A Brief History of House Calls
by Regency
Summary: AU. John returns from Afghanistan, racks up a huge gambling debt and sells his body to make up the money. He enjoys his work as an escort enough to keep it up even after his debts are paid. But things become a great deal more complex when Sherlock Holmes enters the picture. (A series of 'meetings' and the complications that arise when Sherlock gets involved.) In progress.
1. Prologue

Author: Regency

Title: A Brief History of House Calls

Series: The Fight On Your Hands (I)

Rating: high PG-13 to mild R

Spoilers: Loads for series one, vague ones for series two and three

Pairings: John/Sherlock (main), John/Molly, John/Jim, John/not!Anthea, John/Lestrade, John/Sarah, John/so many people who are not all from this fandom

Summary: _John returns from Afghanistan, racks up a huge gambling debt and sells his body to make up the money._ He enjoys his work as an escort enough to keep it up even after his debts are paid. But things become a great deal more complex when Sherlock Holmes enters the picture. (A series of 'meetings' and the complications that arise when Sherlock gets involved.)

**On warnings:** A lot of content has been edited to keep well within the margins of content policy. Some of the redacted bits may be posted on Ao3 at a later date (some already are). I haven't decided. The warnings for what will be posted here are as follow:

**Warnings/Contains:** Non-graphic sex, light humiliation kink, implied mild D/s, bondage (kinbaku and otherwise), breathplay, sensation play, bloodplay, drug use/talk, light BDSM, bad BDSM, questionable medicine, gun violence, crossdressing, implied transphobia/homophobia, references to hate crimes, semi-graphic violence, references to dub-con/non-con, prostitution, underage (US not UK), POC characters not having any white knight bullshit, sugar daddy/sugar baby or mutually beneficial relationships, jargon. **It's actually not that bad. All the unfortunate implications are intended. (Unless they're not, so ask if you're unsure.)**

Author's Notes: Inspired by the prompt here: _John returns from Afghanistan, racks up a huge gambling debt and sells his body to make up the money._ This is a bit _Secret Diary of a Call Girl_ meets _Sherlock._ Straddles the lines a bit between crack and straight drama, but we mostly play it straight. Also, a lot of this stuff comes from net research, so let me know if you feel anything's been misrepresented terribly. Otherwise, enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from Sherlock or any of the other fandoms featured in passing. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun. Any dialogue lifted from any source material is borrowed with love.

~!~

**PROLOGUE**

_Addiction runs in the family._ That was what John told himself as increasing amounts of his pension check disappeared into high-stakes poker games and cheap daily horse races. All right, so the races stopped being so cheap once he'd done them near every day for a month and stakes didn't get much higher than having four kinds of beans for every meal because he'd gambled the rest away. And what he'd borrowed when that wasn't enough? John didn't want to think about the kind of people he owed money to now. He wanted to think of them even less now that the Army was turning him out and he was in need of a new place to live. Temptations and all, he loved London and would give his useless left leg to stay, but with his almost non-existent income and the debt that was sure to follow him just about anywhere he went, he couldn't see his way to keeping afloat on her tab.

John needed help, badly.

Funny, though, he hadn't actually expected to get it.

Apparently, his plight had made itself heard to the right ears and one very hungry night in London, he received a phone call from his old friend Bill Murray, still stationed overseas. The man gave him a number and said, "Everybody's been there, mate. No shame in making money doing what you're good at."

John hadn't asked what people thought he was good at. He hadn't got the name "Three Continents Watson" shooting tin cans.


	2. Cheers from the Front

John hadn't expected this escort lark to actually _work_. He'd figured he'd lose his nerve after two appointments and move into Harry's spare with his tail tucked behind his limping leg. He was a washed out healer gone soldier without any prospects. He wasn't tall, dark, or especially handsome; and, his fashion sense had surpassed 'dire' to become 'terminal' sometime after he'd donned his first set of desert camo. Or earlier, if Harry was to be believed. By all accounts, John was not what typical women were searching for when they talked about Prince Charming. Nor men. He was just a doctor that had been a soldier, who didn't feel much like either anymore. But somehow, for some reason, people wanted him anyway.

Months in, he remained baffled as to how his schedule managed to stay booked. It wasn't that John doubted his skill. He was an exceptional lover and he had scores of exes who kept his number on hand for that reason alone. But getting that far wasn't something that came easily to John, nor had it ever.

John knew he wasn't what most would consider conventionally attractive: His nose stuck out that bit too far, his eyes had their own baggage to check on flights, and his hair was the embodiment of 'nothing special'—and wasn't that him wrapped in a bow? He was easily forgotten and unmanageable to boot; the metaphor practically tortured itself. More so than being effectively invisible, John was what some had, in the past, charitably described as 'petite'. He was below average height for British men and he was slight, if a great deal solider than those physically confronting him seemed to expect.

Escort work had given him a crash course in getting comfortable with his sexuality. The market for male escorts was dog eat dog. Most takers were men, because the stigma for women purchasing sex was heaven high. John had learned to deal: he was cheap and courteous, made an art of being solicitous. Amateurs took what was offered and learned quickly the risk of attaching strings. John had lost a number of sure bets—clients, not horses—doing that very thing. Hunger made him malleable, stretching the adaptability Afghanistan had loaned him to permanence. John rolled with the punches the way he rolled with bodies soft and hard.

He got an email from an old friend in the interim:

**To: ** Idiot Boy (John Watson)

**Subject:** Cheers from the Front

_I'm sending you a care package from the lads with a message: stay clean, stay safe, stay alive. Helmand is still a blistering desert paradise, but not the same without your wretched mug to ruin the view. The 5th needs her sharpshooting port-a-medic. The drop-in we got now can't shoot for shit. It's terrifying, but we'll do what we always have: we'll pick up the slack._

_I'll be in London for leave in a few months. Don't get dead before I get my chance to ride you 'round the goalpost. Last I heard, Murray and Leveaux were jockeying for first rights to your maidenhead. Bless. Expect arsehole messages from them soon; they get net privileges after me. They and the rest send their mildly homoerotic love._

_Ta,_

_Sahar_


	3. Molly Hooper I

**MOLLY HOOPER**

He'd thought her mousey when he entered the flat. She'd been soft-spoken and just a bit nervous to see him, offering tea rather than wine and never quite giving him her back on her way to the kitchen.

It was a well-appointed flat, neat and orderly enough, though a bit of dander swirled when he dropped to the sofa. _A pet, then._ John sighed. It wasn't that he had anything against animals, but they did tend to have the worst timing. As many of the scars on his back were the gifts of felines as the lasting reminders of clients past. Luckily for him, the guilt and embarrassment was always such that John usually got a hazard tip in the offing. He made a mental note to replenish his home medkit. He was going to need more antibiotic ointment for these scratches, not to mention plasters.

Molly smiled at him over a strong tea. "His name's Toby, but he won't be a bother."

John gave the nosy feline a gentle nudge away from his denims with the side of his Oxford. "I'm not as easily rattled as all that. Trust me."

She let a hint of a small smile show through her nerves. _What a pretty girl when smiles._

"Tell me, what do you do?"

"I work with the dead."

"Ah." He wasn't sure how to take that. _I've worked for the dead, too_, was one thought he had. _That industrial lemon cleanser bollocks isn't just in my head_, was another that went wholly unacknowledged. You can take the surgeon out of the desert…

"That must be fulfilling."

She came to life at those words. "Oh, it is! The dead have so much to tell us."

_Not too much. God, I couldn't stand if they talked to me all night _and _all day._ John did enough running to keep tiptop as it was, he might not stop if he had to hear another fallen comrade's dying words while the sweat dripped into his eyes.

"That they do. But I'm a little more interested in the living, Molly."

She pouted a bit, looking sweet and slightly stroppy in the mix.

"I want to hear about you. Aside from working with the newly departed, what makes you happy?"

Molly sucked her peach glossed lips, pulling a face at the taste. John had tasted that very stuff in another kiss. The sickly sweet smell of it made the muscle 'neath his eye tic.

"All I really have is work…and Toby. I don't have much time to do anything else."

"Everyone has something else. We aren't always happy to admit what. You can tell me, Molly. Who will I tell?"

Molly's dark brown eyes flittered around the neat tea service she'd laid out. She'd set it like they were having a proper one. There were tiny sandwiches she'd tried to offer him three separate times when she wasn't sure how to occupy the silences he didn't mind.

She traced the rim of her teacup. It was made all the more delicate by the pallor her hands. Despite the size of his own being comparable, the ruddiness of his tan and the roughness of his calluses gave the porcelain thing an endangered air. Whatever he touched anymore seemed imperilled. Maybe the problem was John.

"What's his name?" Wherever there was that soft look of longing, there was someone.

"His name's Sherlock," she choked. "He doesn't know I'm alive." She flailed a fussy hand. "That's not true, that's not...He might _care_ if I was dead. He cares about the dead, so I care about the dead. I—I cared about them in the first place, naturally, but…I care more now, I suppose, now that he does." Her eyes bore into her tea as though the man might reach out to her from its depths.

"Do you want to talk about him?"

"You don't care about Sherlock. Why should you? You're…you know."

John sipped his tea, glad at least that the refreshments were worth the trip.

"True. That doesn't mean my ears don't work. I'm a bloody good listener in addition to the other stuff."

"I'm sure you are. I'm making an ass of myself, aren't I?"

"We all do from time to time." He swished his mouth of tea. "Some people go for that sort of thing."

"I don't really," she retorted waspishly, and then cringed at her tone, looking apologetic. "I get enough of that from _him._ I just want someone nice for a while. I don't have a lot of time for romance. Not much pashing to be done in the morgue, I'm afraid."

"Not what I remember from my residency, but I suppose it's different these days." _Health and safety codes for one._

"For some people," Molly granted, wistful. "Not me."

"Well, you never know, maybe your Sherlock will change that."

Molly perked up. "You think he could?"

John hefted his good shoulder in concession. "I've never met him. You seem nice and you're very pretty. He'd have to be a fool to overlook you."

The compliment settled over her, bringing colour to her cheeks like a good drink. Whoever this Sherlock bloke was, John hoped he hadn't written him a slip he couldn't fill.

"Now that that's settled, why don't you tell me something else?"

"There's nothing else to me."

"Oh, come on. Everybody's got layers. What do you like?"

"Work. Cats. Knitting. Tea."

"What do you like in bed?"

Molly choked before feigning that she hadn't been. He knew the type. Degree of experience wasn't the matter, quality had been. "Lots of things. Firmness." She nodded emphatically and sat down her teacup hard enough to spill her tea on the coffee table. He watched her flutter at the clean-up a minute to let her gather herself, eyes away from him.

"Dominance?" A word he was getting used to hearing bandied that still tasted coppery in his mouth.

She softened her cavalier posture; flinched into it if you asked him. "Steadiness."

"Gentleness." Another word that struck out across faces like a slap. Some heard accusations when he said it, and that alone told him a great deal about the client he'd have tonight.

Molly folded her hands. "I just don't want it to hurt. If it doesn't hurt, nothing else matters."

John took one hand, curling what might have been a frown into an adoring smile that made every woman who had ever loved him melt right at the centre.

"That, dear Molly, is where you're wrong."

He kissed the inside of her wrist and listed very carefully everything he intended to do to her until the blush had fallen from her face and the wideness in her eyes had faded, until she leaned over and kissed him first, her braided hair like a whip slapping his shoulder and her lips as warm and welcoming and alive as any person he had ever known.


	4. The Life I

**_The Life_**

John was brave and mite stupid. You had to be to become a soldier in wartime. Who else would run in the direction of a scuffle when the target was small but the takers were that much larger than both the target _and_ him? No denying it, John was a fool. Fresh out of the Tesco's late after an appointment, John caught sight of what had to be a punch-up in a back alley and the cry of child in distress.

_Harry will never let me rest in peace if I show up dead here tomorrow._

Knowing that as well he did, John dropped his bag of milk and margarine and jogged to the mouth of a dingy gap between a haberdashery and a clinic he hadn't been hired at, toward the jeering horde of what looked to be boys and tomboys.

"Is there a problem here?"

_I sound like dear old Da._ That wasn't a memory John had much use for.

One of the shorter of lot broke away from the kicking to give John the fuck-off.

"I 'unno, old man. You got a problem?"

"I'm good, thanks. That kid seems to be having a fuck-all kind of day. Why don't you let him up?"

"Don' see why a' oughta. You gonna come an' get 'im?"

John did some idle math of his chances. Three would scatter, easy, braver in the face of a lone child than any adult of authority. At least one other would follow soon after, because they already had one ASBO; another might mean time in a facility. The left maybe two; John could take two.

"I don't think anybody'd like it if I did that."

The overgrown adolescent sneered, making for his back pocket. _A knife, probably not a gun. Keep back from the hands._

"Big talker, but can you play?"

John shook out his hands, forcing himself to remember that these were London streets, not Helmand's, children not child soldiers.

"All I do is play."

...

John split two knuckles dragging the tallest, gangliest stragglers to the nearest uniformed copper on patrol. They were spitting mad and calling him out of his name the whole way, swearing down vengeance and retribution first chance they got. He noticed they got much quieter in back of the cruiser—sullen, too.

The lump of unwashed and oversized trousers they'd left bleeding on the alley asphalt wasn't much happier for being rescued. John was stopped from checking his pulse by the sniping.

"I could have taken them," he snapped as John hauled the boy—twelve, maybe?—onto his feet, where he immediately began to sway. John caught him before he could take a header into a dank puddle.

"In this life or the next?"

"What're you, some kinda 'ero?"

"Where I'm from, we call it a good Samaritan." John guided the boy the nearest bin near the mouth of the alleyway. "Let me get a look at you."

He was banged up all right; black eye, split, a nasty bruises down his neck where somebody's got the fine idea to stomp their trainer.

"You look a sight. Where's it hurt?"

The kid look he got in return was deadly. "Pick a spot."

_Voice seems normal. Probably no serious damage to airway or vocal chords._

"Where's it hurt most?"

All he got this time was a careful shrug that resulted in an olive-toned face paling to startling grey. _Pupil reaction is normal to light exposure. No head wound._

"What was that? Your shoulders or where? Tell me where it hurts." _Injury to clavicle or scapulae likely._ John made a note of where he'd been hurt in his share of childhood dustups._._

The boy hunched in on himself. "Nuthin'."

_Possible cracked ribs. Hands from protecting ribs? Probable/possible. X-rays needed._

"Doesn't look like nothing. Where's it hurt?"

"What's it to you? You can't fix it."

"That's where you're wrong. Fixing it's my job; I'm a doctor."

That confession seemed to spark some interest. "Doctor, eh? Where'd ya learn to fight like that?"

"The army. Give us a look. Where's it hurt?"

The boy squinted at him. "You're not one of them pervs, are ya? I'll scream if ya are."

"As you should, but I'm not. I'm a doctor, you're a patient; let me help."

He wavered on the spot, looking John over for weaknesses even John didn't know he bore. "Yeah, all right."

John sighed, relieved. "Good. Right, that's good. Name's John, by the way. Yours?"

"Cav. John's a pretty crummy name."

"Does me all right." He pulled a penlight out of his coat pocket. _Always does to expect an emergency. _"How many fingers am I holding up?"

On pain of death, Cav waited in the alley whilst John hied back to Tesco's to get plasters and disinfectant. He had him fixed up in ten minutes and sent him on his way with the promise that he'd run instead of fight then next time bigger toughs came to call. John hadn't taken that advice either at his age.

He made a third trip back to the shops for another bag of milk and margarine. Seems his last had grown long legs and walked off.

_No good deed goes unpunished._


	5. Irene Adler

**IRENE ADLER**

John's boss shelled another pistachio and downed it in an audible crunch.

"Thought I should mention: the pilot sends his regards."

"Pilot?" John knit his brows in confusion. Then, it all came back to him. He covered his face. "God, I remember him. The skinny ginger one with all the legs. I must've made him feel like such shit. I don't know what crawled up my arse and died that night." He didn't feel up to mentioning Harry, she practically lived up her own arse and his for all the trouble she caused.

Gareth leaned backward in his executive's chair, smug as the smuggest bastard John had had the supreme displeasure of bowing and scraping to. John could all but see the cream dripping down the cat's chin. _This is what I signed up for. This is my boss._

"Alright, hit me. I can take it. What'd he say?"

"In his typically eloquent fashion, he stammered that you were the rightest fuck he'd ever had and he was looking forward to another go."

John's mouth fell open so far his jaw popped. Gareth guffawed, the flat of his stomach temporarily gaining shape. John scarcely believed him. _I was an actual shit to him, and he wants to see me_ again_?_

"He should hate me. I must've made him feel like a tit."

Gareth laced his hands together across his chest. "Probably. Whatever you did, it worked for him. He adores you, wants to book you ahead of his next London stay, but he doesn't know when he'll be in."

John thought of Martin's threadbare pants and patched socks. "Can he afford me?"

"Johnny boy, the way your stock is rising, the Queen won't able to afford you, soon enough."

"Good for me, then, even if it says something questionable about his taste in shags."

"Maybe, yeah. Anyway, I've got plans for you."

John knew damn well to be cautious when Garry had a plan. "Yeah? What's that?"

"You've gotta expand, go bigger." John narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "Don't look at me like that, Johnny. You've got a gift and a way with people, but you can be better."

John uncrossed his legs to rub at his thigh. He was in pretty deep already; he'd hoped to start scaling back his work, not increasing it. "What are you thinking?"

"How do you feel about BDSM?"

"BDSM?"

"Are you a parrot? Yeah, BDSM. Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism, if you follow the Wikipedia."

"Never gave it much thought."

Gareth had hardly given him a more doubting look.

"I don't know what you want me to say!"

"Have you got any idea how many soldiers we get every week? Boys and girls on leave from the front lines who don't remember how to do anything but take orders or hurt. That's what we do, John, even if you haven't yet."

John shifted in his chair. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. He was on open ground without someone trustworthy on his six.

"Alright, what do you expect me to do about that?" John wasn't up to chancing seeing Bill or Sheppard, Leveaux or Lorne on his ledger, not for this.

"I expect you to be better. You're always complaining about getting bored by the same old thing. Here's a chance to try something new."

"I don't know the first thing about BDSM." Something of a lie. John could use the internet as well as anyone.

"Expected as much," Garry nodded, tapping his fag in the ashtray. "'S why I made you an appointment with an acquaintance of mine."

"Someone I haven't met yet, should I be worried?" John's spine went all stiff. His old man blew smoke.

"If you can survive Afghanistan, Irene should be a stroll through Kandahar."

"I was shot in Kandahar."

"Hear how I didn't say she'd be _painless_."

John scowled. "I'm doing fine, Garry. I don't need classes in fucking. I fuck like I was born to it."

"I've noticed. Doesn't mean you can't improve. Meet The Woman, make an impression. You know as well as I do where a bit of interagency cooperation can lead."

John had a few shared liaisons across the Thames to thank for his new coat. "Yeah, yeah, all right. Give me the place and time; I'll go quietly."

"I don't know, Johnny, she might appreciate the way you beg."

John glared at the man without rancour. "I don't beg, not even when it's my life."

"'S not your life now, it's your job. Time to learn."

...

The first time he laid eyes on Irene Adler, she was starkers in her parlour sipping a cup of tea. He'd known it was tea by the smell, known it was more expensive than even his growing bank account could account for by the same.

"Ms. Adler."

"Doctor Watson." She rose to meet him at the centre of the room. It was a gargantuan effort keeping his eyes to the delicate plane of her shoulders when so much more awaited the wandering eye below. _This isn't just my life, it's my job._ John smiled and met her expectant gaze. "Welcome to my home."

"Thank you for having me."

"Would you care for a drink?"

"No, no need, I'm not thirsty. I'm eager to get started, if that's all right."

"I do love an apt pupil. If you'll follow me. Our classroom is…below." She favoured him with a grand smile and beckoned him to follow her elegant tread. He followed, allowing himself to enjoy the fine line of her posture and evident strength in her limbs. This wasn't an idle woman by any means, not one who taught from the leisure of a plush seat. _And what a fine seat it is._

"Enjoying the view, Doctor?"

John stopped short upon realizing they'd arrived at the door to their destination, and that he'd been caught. He swallowed his inborn stammer. _Won't save me now, will it?_

"Yes. I apologize for…drifting."

She leant against the painted door. "Don't drift too far, or I may be unable to bring you back. Come along." She placed her thumb on a security pad on the door, he noted. He hadn't seen security tech this advanced since he'd watched a news report on the Charles A. Magnussen's Appledore facility, and he'd been in the military. As if sensing his confusion she explained, "I take the privacy concerns of my clients quite seriously, Doctor. It would serve you well to do the same."

_Makes sense._ John served the ordinary and the lonely. He suspected the closest he'd come to a customer with national secrets in their keep would be a closet case with a rich spouse. _All right, that could be a problem. Discretion, it is._

"Er, right."

She led him down a flight of stairs, each step illuminated by embedded lights which came to life with every footfall till they reached the landing. The walls were damasked black and white, the ceiling was painted pristine to match and floor was polished. The sub-level windows were blacked out, presumably to deter nosy neighbours. Belgravia was home to all sorts. John had friends who lived and worked nearbye, but he had hardly ever been himself, and never to a place this…like this.

John was still getting his bearings when Irene turned in all her glory to examine him.

He sucked down a stunned breath. Not because she was beautiful (she was) or because she was naked (not even the first he'd seen this week), but because he wondered if he hadn't overestimated his own fearsome stupidity. He was a hothead and not a little arrogant on the matter of his prowess. Could he lay himself at the mercy of a woman who could make earls whine in submission?

"There, there, Doctor, we're all professionals here."

_Right._ He steeled himself as he might before an especially tricky operation. John saved people. Sometimes, it was with attentiveness, others time his affection, but it was always him. Whatever his hands might have lost, they had not lost the art of putting people back together. The only difference now was how.

Irene stretched and he let himself appreciate the living portrait of her. She was the bare bones of humanity wrapped in decadence and purpose. She wanted him to see, to learn, to emulate.

"Teach me," he said, finally. "I want to understand."

Irene grew still. "Good. I knew you'd be a quick study." She turned away to survey her domain for what he didn't know. He watched anyway, just for the pleasure. Every move was calculated to capture and tame the watching eye. _Capture and compel._

"Lesson the first, Doctor: Your first duty is to the care of your client."

"I'm a doctor," he deadpanned.

Irene was serenely nonplussed. "Sadists wear white coats, too. There isn't a law."

"There might be." _There oughta be._

The Woman hummed. "There might. At any rate, that is my lesson and _my_ rule. Never defy it or you'll answer to my crop before anybody else can find you." What had been glittering charm tapered to diamond-cut austerity. Nudity that may have made another vulnerable imbued her with steel. _'Don't test me, never test me.'_ John would never see the need.

"Understood."

"Brilliant."

Charm returned.

"Lesson the second: Pain is a means, not an end. At least, not for us."

"Per the first rule?"

"You learn quickly. Then, this should be simple." She counted on her trim fingers. "Lesson the third: Never submit." She twined her legs together, toenails varnished ripe violet on the cherry wood floor, her lips an unrepentant cerise. "That is, unless that's your game."

"I have to admit I don't quite know what my game is yet."

"You've come to the right place to learn. Follow me."

Irene sashayed—swaggered? Strutted? No, sashayed was definitely the word—toward the cast iron table serving as a workbench at the side of the room. There, she selected a set of polished silver cuffs. _Not standard issue, I don't think._

"I don't recommend handcuffs, however tantalizing a mood they set. The risk for injury is high when using police-issue. There can be custom-made to your specifications, but I prefer to avoid the risks. Nonetheless, they'll suffice for our purposes today."

She settled herself at the centre of the large bed. _Four posters, all the better to play on. _ When their eyes met, her painted lips swept into a come hither smile that drew John in. He stood at the foot of the bed. Irene slapped a cuff on each slim wrist in smart clicks.

She lifted her tethered hands above her head and fell backward in a graceful arc.

The iron bedstead held steady where the chain of the handcuffs latched onto a closed hook. Irene's upper half dangled above the pillows. _What glorious breasts you have_, thought his hindbrain.

_All the better to tempt you with_, her gaze seemed to purr.

"What do you recommend if not the handcuffs?"

"Conventional wrist restraints may serve you well: scarves, belts, nautical rope. Keep that in mind, nautical rope. You'll want to take care to prevent chafing and lost circulation; it's good for that but you'll still need to be vigilant. Should you decide to continue in the domination business, I can recommend a number of custom manufacturers who'll design any restraint you like to your preference. I singlehandedly keep three in business."

He believed her. The immense walk-in closet in the corner seemed made for a war chest of toys and negligees. He little doubted she wield one as well as the other.

"I'm not nearly there yet." John was hardly _here_ yet.

"Not yet, but that's no reason to be unprepared for success."

"Right." He made another note of it in back of his crowded head. He worried anew over all he might forget.

"I presume you've looked into the research I provided you."

John thought over the videos he could never admit he'd watched to another living soul, that he'd rather desperately scrubbed from his second-hand laptop with the help of a fellow kerb crawler with a techie streak.

"Yeah, I have."

"Good. Then, it's time to apply what you've learned."

"Already?" He was a good lover, he was a _fantastic_ lover. What he wasn't sure of yet was whether he'd be good at this.

"Now now, Doctor, I don't get dolled up for just anyone. Besides, we both know, experience is the finest teacher."

He gulped.

"Don't worry, I'm not afraid. After all, sadists don't wear white coats, do they?" She winked.

"Not here, they don't."

"That's promising. Shall we begin?"

John had shed his coat upstairs. He shed his shoes next and rolled up his sleeves. Invulnerability was for his clients. They were both professionals here.

"What do you want? Or need. Tell me what you need."

"Be gentle with me, Doctor." She affected an air of vulnerability and innocence, fluttering her eyelashes in a panto act so practiced it should have verged on absurd. But this was The Woman; she dwelled in giving sincerity to the absurd. Nevertheless, something in him stirred at the display, however false. It might have been laughter, though he very much doubted it. _But she may be laughing at me._ He found he didn't mind that much. Very little frightened him.

"You really mean that? Be gentle?" As in medicine, he had to peel back the layers of what his patient wanted him to see to what he needed to see to understand.

Her laughter rang like a bell. _What does she see watching me?_ Someday, he'd think to ask.

"Why don't you find out, Doctor?" She was tempting him to try. To fail perhaps, yes, but to try.

Sholto had said to him once, 'You can never be great until you've been goddamn bloody awful first.' This was his turn.

He reached for the right words before they began.

"Hard limits?"

She lifted her chin, glittering eyes crinkling in approval. _Good, I've impressed her._

"No intercourse. Frottage is acceptable though not encouraged. Contrary to popular myth, dominance needn't be an entirely sexual experience."

"Right. I never thought of that." He hadn't. He would from now on.

"A routine oversight." She raised her shoulders in disinterest. "I'd prefer no marks more incriminating than a welt, if you please. I have new clients arriving in the morning; it wouldn't do to alarm them on the first visit. I try to wait until the third to do anything _really_ alarming." She gave an impish wink. John _liked_ her. "You don't have that luxury. You'll need to put your best, firmest foot forward from the moment your client comes through the door."

"I've done that."

She narrowed her arresting blue eyes. "_Firmer_."

"You'll have to show me."

Wiggling into a more comfortable position over the down pillows at the head of the bed, she beckoned him forth.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

He _definitely_ liked her.

"Safe word?"

She smiled like shards of pearl. "Coventry."


	6. The Life II

_The Life_

"Welby, pet, how do you keep getting into this these things?" John dabbed a gauze pad across the young man's split lip. Welby winced and squirmed in response. John lightened his touch till the boy stilled.

"I was just doing what I do on the street when this bunch of arsehole chavs started giving me grief." Welby ducked his dark head. "You know how it is. Apparently, they've never seen a pretty boy. Wankers."

John lifted Welby's face back to dab his lip with iodine now that the area was clear. "They're wankers, yeah, but you still need to look out for them. I don't like how I've seen them watching you."

Welby Carr, all of sixteen, was one of the dearest lads John had seen in the business, with big brown eyes and curly hair that drew eyes wherever he went. His looks kept him in the threads and kicks he preferred, but they also left him an easy target for street kids with nothing more pressing to do than to poke at him. Welby, or Wells as his friends called him, was female-to-male transgender, which made him somewhat of an outlier in their area anyway; but, the way the rest of the world could treat him when they had him pegged was too alarming to bear. John worried for him, he couldn't help himself.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do, mate. I gotta work, yeah?"

John brushed back the boy's loose curls, smoothing the edges of the bandage he'd taped to Welby's temple. "Yeah, I get it. Just text me when you're walking? Can't have anything else happening to you."

"Yeah, yeah," Welby nodded, settling down into the cushions of John's lilo. "Won't be much left if my sis gets hold of 'em anyway."

"Yeah?" John tucked his grandmother's afghan around Welby's wiry frame.

"Mmmhm, yeah. My Sally's a copper, the best."

"You can't stay with her?" John hated to see such a great kid heading down this sort of path. John knew why he was here himself, but he was learning new stories for other people every day.

"She's got a good thing going at the Yard. Having me around might muck that up. Not gonna do it, she's been too good to me."

"Funny you should mention that, I don't think she'd mind." But Wells had already fallen to sleep.

Sighing, he set about clearing off his medical mess. He wouldn't be sleeping with his brain lit up like a hot zone. Any time there was one thing wrong, there was bound to be ten, so he kept awake on cups of black coffee and muted crap telly. He kept his phone on his lap till five in the morning, then set it to charge. John nodded off in his armchair as dawn hit, his gun tucked into the cushion at his side. While he may not have been a soldier anymore, he was a watchdog at heart, and a watchdog never left his post.

...

From: Nuri

_I think my idiot sister wants to have your babies._

From: John

Sounds reasonable to me.

From: Nuri  
><em>You're gonna be an intolerable brother-in-law.<em>

From: John

_Love you, too, mate. Electric kettles make great wedding gifts, by the way._

From: Nuri

_Tosser._


	7. Agent X

**The Woman Eventually Known as "Anthea"**

She was quite beautiful, he decided while guiding her to straddle him on the bed.

She'd sent a set of bed sheets ahead, claiming anything of lesser quality made her itch, and who was John to complain? She was the woman without a name and without a number. He had come highly recommended, she said, and he didn't prevaricate, sensing she was a serious person who'd appreciate a business-like attitude. He'd almost heard her smile in her "I look forward to meeting you, Doctor." He'd definitely had a smile on his face, then.

She'd stripped herself before he could so much as a lift a hand, blue silk threads gleaming in the low lights she'd demanded, clasped at generous waist and bust. Though he wondered idly if he might have been more than her lover for pay in another life, he knew better.

Women like her didn't have to entertain steady lovers. She was more than any one could hope to keep. Men might jockey and play for position and want all the while, but they could never have her, not like he would, not until she allowed.

God did he love the powerful ones.

John traced her thighs, her waist, acclimated to the bold shape of her breasts and how they fit in his hands. He was down to his skivvies per her instructions, but he wished he was in less. There wasn't a part of her he didn't want to touch. The inside of her knees were soft against his hips, as soft as the hooks of her bra were sharp under his fingertips. That was her, his mysterious woman, all soft and sharp, watching him take her in.

He fell backward at a solid push from her hands. His view of the horrid mauve ceiling was obscured by the not-at-all-horrid brown of her eyes. She stretched herself along his body, fitting her hollows to his hard points, his hollows to her taut peaks. He would have given her anything in any life, but he could only give her this in this one.

She gathered his wrists above his head and held him there. Literally. He couldn't shake her. Not for all of his training and dirty fighting from Edinburgh and North York could he loose her hold, and that was when he knew exactly who he was dealing with. He dared not even breathe the words 'British Secret Service' lest she have him shoved into the deepest crevasse of the earth. He might have invaded Afghanistan, but he was nobody's fool.

She skimmed his facial expression and sighed.

"I won't hurt you."

"Not afraid of that." He made to roll his good shoulder just to see if he could. No such luck. The army had taught him not to underestimate the strength that feminine softness concealed. It was strength all the same. He began to breathe a little faster.

She raised an eyebrow at what must have been his growing flush. "Convincing."

He knew it bloody well wasn't by the twist of her lips. That twist would haunt him, the painted Bordeaux burgundy of it, and how it would stain his collar.

"You are very dangerous," he said because John Watson never had done fear right.

"Yes." The liars weren't the ones to fear, it was those who knew their power too well to bother hiding. Damn if John didn't crave the exhibitionists.

Pinned as he was, he used the only limbs left to him: John tightened his core and flipped them both sharply to the right, landing her squarely on her back and him on top. She still had a tight hold of his hands, but he had her pinned. They had trapped each other.

He caught a flash of teeth that just may have been a smile, only it was gone when he really looked. She stared up at him as if he was something new and strange, as if she hadn't seen it all and he the same.

"You probably hear this all the time, but you're a stunning woman."

"You're right, I hear that all the time."

She loosened her grasp on his wrists to slide her hands down his arms to his shoulders. He held himself still when she reached his scar. She touched it as if she knew its history as intimately as the satiny scar on her ribcage. She skirted it with respect, not fear. _Very much the type of woman I'd fall in love with if I fell at the drop of a hat._

"Why me? And don't tell me it's because I come 'highly recommended'."

"You do, but why should the boys have all fun with you?" She swayed up to nibble his thin lips. The top, the bottom, the top again. He let her lead, let himself enjoy the heady sensation of being seduced.

"Are you going to talk about me, Agent X?"

"Yes."

"Then, I'd best give you a good story to tell."

He slid down her body in a trail of callused strokes and featherweight kisses, pausing only to part her legs and install them on his shoulders. His pain could wait, her pleasure would not.

John loved all kinds of foreplay, massages, snogging, toys, name them. But he had a preference for this, laying his lovers open and taking apart by mouthfuls. Very few people could resist blatant worship, and she had body enough for a world of temples.

He swept her panties to have his first taste of her. A spike of lust jabbed at his gut at how good she tasted, musky and slightly sweet. He rocked his hips against the edge of the bed to soothe the heat in his groin. He was going to make a meal of her, five courses and aperitifs.

She sucked in a silent gasp at the first curl of his forefinger inside her, at his tongue swirling a tight circle over her clit. Agent X clutched tightened her thighs around his face, whimpering for more.

Never let it be said that John Watson didn't know how to wrap a woman around his fingers.


	8. Molly Hooper II

**MOLLY HOOPER**

She was incredibly enthusiastic this time. She hadn't wanted much, just to touch base, just for someone to listen to her. John didn't have a problem with that; he spent more time simply listening to people than he did shagging them. And it was better for his back, anyway. He hadn't quite recovered from his last run-in with that damned Toby.

So, he laid across her bed while she brushed her hair and talked about the oblivious—John read _cruel_, but she was paying—git who she'd been arse over tit for since the moment they met. He was beautiful, _her word_, and brilliant beyond the currently established meaning of the word. John briefly thought that once their crossed wires got cut through she might stand a chance. His latest crack about the asymmetry of her face put paid to that. _He's a dick, then. She has a taste for dicks. Good that I'm here._

"Molly," he said, interrupting what was proving to be a lengthy diatribe about his worth despite his social shortcomings, "you're beautiful. Makeup doesn't matter. Your hair doesn't matter. You'd be a gorgeous corpse, just like you're gorgeous alive." _And he still wouldn't want you_, he didn't say, though he was tempted. The sooner she woke up from this nightmare of lovesickness, the better for her.

Thankfully, Molly wasn't a mind reader. She was sweet and bright enough to put John to shame, but she carried her heart in her eyes. She was always going to be disappointed.

He offered her his hand. It was small relative to the hand he knew she desired, but it fit hers. He pulled her down onto the bed and held her in his arms. She curled up small to tuck herself under his chin. They remained that way for the rest of the night.


	9. Just 'Greg' & Sherlock Holmes I

**Just "Greg" & Sherlock Holmes**

John was riding high off a glorious pull the when he met Mike Stamford in the park. The bloke, who'd called himself Greg, had been good-looking, if a bit grizzled around the edges, and had a voice like rolling in gravel. Greying hair, dark eyes, and the body of a rugger in a cheap suit, John had made him for a copper in three minutes. He'd given him another five to see that John wasn't going to bite and another ten when it became obvious that Greg didn't care.

They'd bought one another drinks and slipped away from the bar to an out the way booth where they could talk more. And talk they did, about rugby and football and how much easier uni had been, hadn't it, and how adulthood hadn't turned out to be paradise they'd dreamed of when growing up was all they'd wanted to do. Greg had been exhausted and wound-up so tight he creaked the first time John kissed him.

John hadn't bottomed since med school, but Greg made it worth it. Those powerful hips were a machine between his thighs, those shoulders perfect handholds when things got a little rough. And how rough they got, John riding him against the dingy bricks next to the pub, his eyes clinched shut to make it last, Greg's large, sturdy hands holding him right where he was wanted. John had remembered when sex hadn't been a chore. It wasn't work, this was human connection at its purest, pleasure in the ink-stained hands of a master. John hadn't come that hard since university.

Greg wasn't in John's flat the next morning, but John didn't take it personally since hardly anyone ever was. He took solace in the slip of paper next to his lamp that read, 'Give me a call if you could ever use a mate – Greg' and he'd listed his number. John had tipped the note into his billfold to keep, no real plans brewing to call on the man but pleased all the same of having the option.

John was replaying the night's events during his walk through Regents Park when he realized that somebody was calling his name.

"John? John Watson?"

John stopped slowed his stroll to a saunter, sweeping his gaze around his immediate area out of habit. He swept right past the man flagging him down the first time, it was only on his second pass that recognized his old Bart's classmate.

"Mike Stamford, that you?" John's battle instincts drew down on taking in his old friend's kindly face.

"That's me. Took you a second, ah?" Stamford waved at his rounded figure in jest. John had learned not to notice. You didn't satisfy clients by fixating on their imperfections.

"Not long at all. How the hell are you?"

He dithered, not altogether bothered. "I got fat."

John huffed.

"I heard you were abroad getting shot at. What happened?"

"I got shot."

The truth was as always something of a mood killer, nevertheless they took it in stride, opting to get coffee from the Criterion on Stamford's wallet. They talked quietly in the interim, something Stamford was good for, quiet and light chatter, thoughtfulness. Now John knew him for more. An inspired wife, aimless yet inoffensive children, an understated love for teaching the thick-headed young. John didn't envy the man his life, but didn't think it could have happened to a worthier bloke.

And then it was John's turn at the chokey.

"What about you? Just staying in town while you're getting yourself sorted?

John scoffed, wishing though he might. _Nothing lasts forever, not luck, not good health, not secrecy._ "I can't afford London on an army pension." _Not untrue._

"Ah, and you couldn't bear to be anywhere else."

_Not when this is where I've got my second wind. I've got a reason to roll over rather than wallow. London's in my blood now._

Stamford offered the usual platitudes and they didn't bother John so much when he knew his own words were twisted for a lie. He'd have to come up with something one of these days to remain above board in the eyes of his colleagues and the law. _One of these days, right._

"Can't Harry help?"

"Not bloody likely."

"I don't know, can't you get a flatshare or something?"

John laughed, more than a bit knowingly. "Who'd want me for a flatmate?"

Mike chuckled.

John looked to him, wondering what joke he'd missed. His head was in the next evening with the next client already. "What?"

"Well, you're the second person to say that to me today."

John thought it over and made a gut choice. His life was unlikely to change any other way, he decided and asked, "Who was the first?"

…

Following a short ride up to St. Bart's, Mike introduced John to the most attractive man he'd ever seen. So much so that John had to wonder whether his old friend had him figured out, after all, because if Sherlock Holmes wasn't a high-roller's prize pet he was clearly dressed for the wrong line of work.

He already had John's phone in his possession by the time the main attraction truly got underway.

"Afghanistan or Iraq?"

"I'm sorry?" He didn't sputter. John didn't sputter, not in his nature, but he did get terribly confused.

"Which was it? Afghanistan or Iraq?" the taller, younger man repeated, and it was absolutely no help.

He let his gaze slide to Mike, knowing he must have looked increasingly alarmed, in response to which Mike merely smirked like bleeding Eros or Cupid. _It's not too late for me to kill you. I have the gun and everything, don't tempt me._ Sherlock Holmes was about as much as John could stand and they had met all of forty-five seconds before.

"Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you—" John's reply was drowned out by the sound of Holmes's 'Molly' arriving with his coffee. John didn't have to turn his head to know who he meant. In fact, John suddenly knew a bit too much about the inner-working of two people in the room. Molly Hooper, hopelessly smitten, and Sherlock Holmes, either dreadfully clueless or decidedly cruel. He hadn't known the man long enough to be sure where his money would lie best. In all honesty, he couldn't say he wanted to.

John took back his phone and thought of how he might make his current living situation a bit more liveable. His finances were such that he could probably swing things a bit longer if he had to, particularly if he took on a couple of additional clients.

All the same, he had his hands full here with Sherlock Holmes, who'd found Molly's makeup alterations lacking and had no compunction about saying as much. Though she hadn't so much as glanced at him, nor he at her, he pitied her a bit. She was scarcely the wilting violet she played for Holmes, but she wasn't made of sturdiest stuff outside her bedroom door. It made John shift on his feet, unsure whether he should say something, as though someone had spoken the safe word and gone unheeded. _This is not going well_, which was so incredibly apparent it bore thinking in detail only to the smallest degree.

Molly scarpered off with her tattered composure, leaving John to watch her go, somewhat certain he'd hear from her before the day was finished. She'd hardly noticed he was there, or Mike for that matter, he doubted she'd had eyes for anyone bar Holmes the entire time she'd been in the lab. _May be able to stick the old flat a bit longer, then._

"How do you feel about the violin?" asked the man in the tailored suit with the wind-swept hair and an ease with the lab equipment which John envied, if only for the steadiness of his hands.

"I'm sorry, what?" _This must be how a broken clock feels, telling the same time, no matter the hour._ Bewildered was the word that came to mind. He was bewildered and bemused and agog—and he really needed to spend less time perusing his thesaurus, it was driving him round the twist.

"I play the violin when I'm thinking. Sometimes, I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates _should_ know the worse about each other." Holmes capped it off with a smile so glaringly disingenuous that John was seized by the urge to bring him to heel. _This is becoming my response to everything. Ought to mention that to Ella._ Unlikely. Professional hazard of a part-time Dom. _He'd be the world's mouthiest sub._ Irene would love him.

Everything between that grin and Holmes's departure was beyond John to make any sense of. What he knew with unshakable certitude was that he'd like to strangle Mike Stamford with his bare hands. Holmes was imperious, arrogant, and more perceptive than any single man had the right to be. If he didn't know what John was up to, he'd figure it out quick and that was the last thing John needed. But more than that, right now, what he needed was another place to stay and it looked like Baker Street was down to be it.

_Riding crop? He carries a riding crop._ While looking like someone's kept boy moonlighting as a strict Dom, John had to note. Maybe their lines of work weren't so divergent after all.

He must have looked as dazed as he felt, because Mike grinned the same grin he had when suggesting they spend the week preceding finals in Paris in lieu of formal study. They just managed to hoof it home late on the night before. Like many things, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. This didn't even seem like a bright idea now.

Mike only smiled wider. "Yeah, he's always like that."


	10. Just 'Greg' & Sherlock Holmes II

**Just "Greg" & Sherlock Holmes**

When John arrived to inspect 221B at 5 pm the next day, his limp was a bit worse than the usual. A married couple the night before, a Donna with her husband Shaun had requested an incredibly involved roleplay. Some work tool that was oddly 'sonic' but not a light saber, and they'd ask for a certain shade of blue sheets that John'd had to pre-order weeks ahead for things to be perfect. The wife had looked oddly displeased until Shaun had called him by his title, Doctor, then things had gone swimmingly. There hadn't been any sex in it for him, just a bit of innuendo, but it got the couple going and John wasn't fussed. It was only the rough-housing—loads of slapping, so much slapping; his ears were still ringing for all the slapping—that had done him in. At any rate, John was all set to go halves on a security deposit. He'd been pat for a month now and was only too happy to vacate his dodgy place for anything approaching an improvement, events permitting.

Sherlock Holmes stepped out of a taxi just as John knocked on 221 Baker Street's front door. All legs, curls, and Belstaff coattails; Lord Byron _wished_ he'd dreamt up that profile. John wasn't one to be smitten, having seen it all in his previous and current profession, in addition to his personal romantic exploits, but he could appreciate the striking good looks this man had been blessed with. John wasn't half-jealous. He wouldn't have had to work a fraction as hard to get where he'd got if he looked like that.

The younger man joined him at the door, where they shook hands, and Holmes became Sherlock and John continued to be utterly baffled about the man offering to share a flat with him. _Death sentence? Deal? Ensured it, then? _ Had John thought for a moment he could outrun Daddy Longlegs here, he would have swiftly turned tail and beat a hasty retreat back to his current residence.

The lady of the house stepped out at last and Sherlock moved eagerly forward to give her a hug.

"Mrs. Hudson, Doctor. John Watson." John would have taken her hand if he could have done so and remained standing. Sherlock put paid to that hesitance and they all went in. The stairs were murder on his leg and jarred his shoulder something awful. He bit off the groans of pain, regretting the choice to forego his pain meds before stepping out.

Sherlock presented the sitting room like a boy having over his first friend. John was reasonably impressed. The flat was nice, if a bit cluttered. With his prospective flatmate's belongings, it seemed. Not for the first time, John wondered whether he had become the target of an elaborate prank. Surely, Sherlock Holmes wasn't wanting for a flatmate badly enough to rely on word of mouth. That face and that voice, John thought they must have been lining up to share a loo with him—and then some. Yet here the man stood in all his glory, showing off and out at the hint of John's attention. He didn't know what to make of that, and he didn't entirely mean the disarticulated skull taking up space on the mantle.

"What do you think, then, Doctor Watson," the landlady asked, as she frittered into the sitting room behind them as Sherlock shed his coat and scarf. "There's another bedroom upstairs if you'll be needing two bedrooms."

John didn't miss a beat, still inspecting the lay of the land. "Of course, we'll be needing two."

"Oh, don't worry, there's all sorts around her. Mrs. Turner next door has got married ones."

John glanced at Sherlock again. An intricate practical joke, had to be. Was candid camera still the done thing? He wondered about that.

Mrs. Hudson went to the kitchen, all purpose and bustle, and complained about the mess. John wondered if he'd wandered into an upscale meth den, which was just about the calibre of his luck in the last year or so. _Drug den, brothel, house of ill repute. Is it a stench I'm giving off that attracts the left of centre?_ Never mind that John had left the mainstream with an armour-piercing round to the shoulder. The world he loved had little use left for him and he of it, save the camouflage.

An internet search had turned up a multitude of details. Brilliant, mad, brilliant, and madder still. John always had liked the mad ones. What he no longer thought he could support was the attention that came with one. His secrets weren't the only ones in need of keeping, after all.

_Sherlock Holmes, what'm I to do with you?_ John's every idea was less feasible then the last. _Could be the most brilliant man in London and he wants to live with me._ _Could be the most deceptive, too. _ He must have been missing something. Seems all he ever did anymore was miss the bleeding obvious.

"Found your website, The Science of Deduction, was it?" John remarked once he'd sat to rest his tired leg.

"What'd you think?" Sherlock tipped on polished leather toes.

_Is he? He isn't?_ If John didn't miss his guess, Sherlock Holmes was just about preening in expectation. _Not sure you've earned that._ John was sceptical.

"What's that look about?"

"Dunno what you mean."

"You've read my accounts, haven't you? I'd like to hear your thoughts."

John's telling face must have told of his incredulity. It tended to do that.

The younger man's face fell. He had an ego and already John had bruised it. He was bad with fragile things anymore.

Just when John was about to be fed a brute force lecture in Holmesian investigative technique, as John could tell by his body language, by his tone, by the steely, offended look in his eye, they were interrupted by the arrival of…'Just Greg.'

He was dishevelled and breathing heavy from having taken the stairs in twos and threes. He was handsomer in the light for all the panting, for all that he only had eyes for Sherlock Holmes. _Bet that happens often._ John was too curious to be bothered; his professional and personal pride ran in parallel lines that never crossed.

_Four suicides and a house call._ John knew from house calls.

"Where," his presumptive flatmate inquired in lieu of a greeting.

'Just Greg' pocketed his hands in ill-fitting slacks. "Brixton, Lauriston Gardens."

John watched them volley back and forth, fascinated by the interplay of a stranger he hardly knew and one he knew just well enough to sate.

"What's new about this one? You wouldn't have come to get me if there wasn't something different."

"You know how they never leave notes?"

"Yeah."

"This one did."

Something in Sherlock Holmes's pale eyes flipped to life. The thinker was thinking. _He might be the genuine article._ John had known a few.

There was bartering over who and when and wherefore that John didn't try to follow. Anderson, the unwilling assistant, was of no consequence. Police car or cab of little interest. It was the frisson of something undefined that made the moment familiar. War had felt like this. John wouldn't dare say he missed it now, but he knew it all too well. Something was brewing in Lauriston Gardens.

In the space it took for him to become certain of it, the detective had come and gone, their gazes crossing paths without locking. _Maybe it wasn't him._ The pub had been dark and the alleyway behind darker. No great loss, he supposed.

John watched his flatmate dance with glee in the face of death and boggled, unsure if it was just himself that had broken further or the world that had shifted ever so slightly on its axis. He ought to be aghast, really, yet surprised was hard to reach at this juncture. Sherlock Holmes was like no other man he'd met yet. _Sholto came close. Not gleeful, not quite, but possessed. 'Death should be faced with reason and logic or not at all.'_ He shook off the remembrance; like Sahar and Murray and gun sights glinting over distant hilltops. Not much sense in mourning what could not return.

He was contemplating what he'd over Sherlock's discarded newspaper after the man had gone. This was Lestrade's investigation. DI Lestrade. John allowed himself a moment's pride at landing a detective inspector, because the wary man captured in the washed-out photograph was very much the man who'd laughed breathlessly when his neck was kissed. _Well done, Lestrade. Well done, me._

"You're a doctor."

If John were the type to startle easily, he would have lost his skin. Sherlock stood at the door, donning his leather gloves.

John nodded to his question and put aside the front page.

"In fact, you're an army doctor."

John took the liberty of standing. There was something to this line of questioning. John knew well enough when he was being led. "Yes."

"Any good?"

"Very good."

"Seen a lot of injuries, then. Violent deaths?"

John assented. The hairs on the back of his neck stood as the man regarded him in blatant curiosity. John was a curiosity in and of himself. That was new.

"A bit of trouble, too, I bet."

He scrutinized his latest fascination in return.

"Enough for a lifetime. Far too much." Not a lie, not completely. John told twenty partial lies in a week, all portions of a one. Sherlock cocked his tousled head as if reading that in John's patched clothes and worn treads. _He might have done._ The consulting detective didn't seem to mind the falsehood.

"Want to see some more?"

John? Well, how could John resist?

"Oh, god, yes."

Not a lie.

* * *

><p>Sherlock was conversing with a gaggle of street urchins when John met him out on the stoop. They were dirty and bedraggled as expected but keen. A set of hazel eyes John recognized found him in the bunch. The middlemost-sized child flashed him a wide grin, then averted his gaze back Holmes—<em>no, no, Sherlock. That's what he prefers.<em> John tilted his head in acknowledgement, a mute gesture to tell his parents John sent his best. Cavendish "Cav" McHugh was a skilful lad who John would see in school yet. He journeyed from a council flat in Roehampton to Westminster where he wreaked unholy havoc with the other London sprites and, if appearance could be believed, acted as eyes and ears for Sherlock Holmes. _Will wonders never cease?_ John resisted belief.

The self-styled consulting detective whipped around to urge John down the couple of steps to the pavement. "This is John Watson. He's agreed to assist me for the evening. Should you be unable to contact me for any reason, you may contact him in my place." He plied John with a scant conciliatory bow which didn't request assent so much as it informed him this had been taken as read. "Give them your mobile number."

John squinted. "Sorry?"

Hol—Sherlock skewed his eyes toward the heavens. "Your mobile number. The number at which someone might call your mobile phone. I can do it if you'd prefer, but I thought you'd like the chance to do it yourself." He smiled then, all mouth and nothing more. "As a show of good faith."

Cav, God love him, intervened in time to keep John swatting the tosser. "No worries, it's good. I know how to reach 'im." He tossed John a merry salute and led his cohorts into the London horde.

Sherlock arched an inquiring eyebrow at John. John gave not a single fuck and didn't rise to the question. The taller man beckoned a taxi for them. John limped after him, wondering offhand whether he'd even wait for him to get into the taxi before speeding off. Though Sherlock's fingers were beating out a samba on his knee, the taxi waited for the lengthy process of John dragging his blasted limb inside. They raced away seconds later.

"You didn't introduce me as 'Doctor,' why?" John had a feeling, but then he had many, many feelings and they weren't always on.

Sherlock adjusted the fingers of his gloves. "Had I known your salutation was of such importance to you, I'd have mentioned it first and foremost." Condescension wafted off him like pheromones. "Because telling a bunch of impoverished waifs that the nice limping man with the bad shoulder has the authority to write prescriptions for sellable narcotics couldn't possibly end in tragedy. Oh, wait." John disregarded the insult to his capabilities; he cared for himself fine, thanks.

"Why do you use them if you don't trust them?"

"It's nothing to do with trust and everything to do with oversight. I can't be on every street corner. I need satellites, informants cognizant of the sort of matters that are of interest to me."

"And you chose children." John chose not to comment further.

Sherlock redirected his acerbic attention from the passing scenery. "That bothers you."

"Many, many things bother me." _Poverty, violence, war, addiction, famine._ John was a living bother.

"You think I'm endangering them."

"I don't know enough to make that judgment." John knew _exactly_ enough to make that judgement. He'd drown the man personally if turned out one of his kids had been hurt on account of spying for him.

"They choose to work for me. I don't coerce them." John had little stomach for rationalization.

"When the choice is food or a bit more danger than normal, what's 'choice' even mean? Choice is a luxury."

"Speaking from experience?"

John demurred. "My eyes work fine."

"Indeed." The detective passed into introspection. John slipped into the same.

A consulting detective. John had Google searched the man and the title and he wasn't yet entirely sure he understood. It read as the sort of thing people thought up as children, like a part-time ballerina, part-time barrister. The sheer nerve of taking something known to make it unique or at least give it a unique name struck him as impressive, though he wasn't assured of the practicality of the thing. _Private eye, consulting detective; where the line? What's the true distinction?_

"One of them claimed to have your contact details. Any idea how that came about?"

"I _am_ listed."

"Yes, of course, one 'John Watson' out of how many in central London? That strikes me as a both practical _and_ timely way to get in touch in an emergency." He scoffed. "Don't insult my intelligence with that poor attempt at misdirection. He had your details himself because you'd given them to him."

John saw no reason to lie. "I did."

"Why? You haven't any money to spare, save what you've put aside for your portion of the coming month's rent, and you don't 'go' for that sort of thing from what I deduced of your interest in my Irregulars a short while ago. What could possess you to give your mobile number to a child sleeping rough?"

John cracked his knuckles in absent fashion and was amused to see Sherlock's eye twitch in irritation.

"Oh, I don't know. Any number of things, really. It's awful out there, dangerous for a kid on his own, maybe I just wanted to give him a safe place to turn."

"And you gave the number to your mobile rather than a landline because you were planning to seek new lodgings and didn't want to lose touch."

"That's the size of it."

"I see." John repressed an urge to inquire as to whether he really did.

"So, we're going to a crime scene."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"My presence was requested by a colleague of mine, you met him just today. Lestrade is a homicide detective out of Scotland Yard."

"You're employed by Scotland Yard?" John's stomach threatened to drop out.

"From time to time, as a consultant. They consult me when they find themselves in over their heads." His mouth sloped in crooked satisfaction. "As you can imagine, they keep me quite busy."

John couldn't dispute that. The coppers could be right useless when it counted. "But why you? Why not any of the other hundred men in town who fancy themselves a regular C. Auguste Dupin?" Sherlock grunted at the mention of the name. "I mean, one private detective is as good as any other, isn't it?" John regretted his words the moment they were spoken; Holmes' demeanour grew positively glacial. _Not my most tactful comment, I can admit that._ "The Yard doesn't consult amateurs is what I meant, so why you?"

He regretted _that_ statement much sooner when his life story in its near entirety was called to the carpet and ripped open, and Harry's was stripped down to its most hopeless elements. _Not a small task._ And John would be the one to know having shared so much of it with her.

"You're right: Scotland Yard doesn't consult _amateurs._" Sherlock concluded in a RP flourish of words.

John whistled, astonished. "Wow. That was...amazing."

"What?" The other man seemed surprised. John wasn't one to withhold praise where it was due and this certainly warranted a talk-up. _Never thought I'd commend a man for a masterful insult, but here we are._

"Amazing, that was truly amazing." John thought he might have detected a flush on those marvellous cheekbones.

"That's not what people usually say."

John didn't like the sound of that. "What do they usually say?"

"'Piss off.'"

"Ah."

That, John could believe.


	11. Three Warnings

**Three Warnings**

John limped away from the crime scene and flashing lights at a snail's pace, Sergeant Donovan's warning banging away at his brain. Sally Donovan didn't strike him much as a nice one, but then, Sherlock Holmes hardly could have earned the prize either. They had a muddy history John didn't care to poke at.

Upon thinking of Donovan again, John was struck by a sense of déjà vu. Yeah, she'd been blunt, even a bit unsympathetic when it was him alone, but she hadn't been cruel—not to John anyway. There had been something about her he took to right off, else he wouldn't be giving her words their due now.

_Why's she seem so familiar? I haven't met her, I'd remember her. Donovan. Donovan. I don't know any more Donovans, I don't think, so not a brother from the Army or even a husband. What'd Sherlock call her? He called her Sally. Sally? Copper Sally?_ John may have been one for playing the odds, but he wasn't up to these. _Shit_.

She'd warned him off Sherlock, not merely because she disliked the man; she'd done it to pay John a favour. John couldn't figure a reason for her to bother unless she thought she owed him one. _Copper Sally, Wells' big sis. Fuck me. The world's getting a bit small for comfort anymore._

He couldn't be playing with fire twice in one squad. Greg was dangerous but done with. Sherlock was reckless. Sally might have been his saving grace.

John was so deep in thought that the ringing of a public phone almost failed to grab his attention. But not quite...

This was definitely not John's night.

...

John was getting increasingly sick of meeting his clients at work. He was beginning to feel like someone's unwitting stalker. Greg—no, Lestrade, it was; no first name, detective inspector—had looked somewhat hunted and John hadn't wanted that. He'd liked Greg in a way he didn't get to like people nowadays, touched him for reasons he no longer touched people who weren't paying him. That was clearly over now.

_Of course it is._ John had made his own bed. It just seemed that all he ever did was lie in it nowadays. Nope, if this was what life with Sherlock Holmes was like, John would have to pass. That didn't mean he wouldn't think of the madman with _some_ fondness. After all, John hadn't had that much fun in ages, even if all he'd done was watch the man think circles around a room of coppers, scamper up and down a staircase that made Escher's tessellations seem straightforward and uncomplicated, and disappear without a trace. Very few people John had known could leave him smiling in memory of them. Sherlock Holmes had done that and that took some doing.

John's kidnapper, on the other hand, struck him as a supercilious prick before he'd clapped eyes on the man in question. Call him a sexist jerk if you like, this had the work of a smirking man all over it.

...

Agent X leant away from him inside the car. The angle was a subtle one, eighty-seven degrees to a peerless ninety. She tapped away at her phone like it was all the rage. John knew better than to say a word. He'd pissed off somebody important. _ Please, don't let it be her husband. _

She spoke only to say, "He worries, constantly. Don't become another concern."

John vowed to himself that he wouldn't. _I have no idea what that means._

He had kissed this woman once and she had laughed, high and clarion, flattered and not a little embarrassed at the sound ringing out. She hadn't had a name at the time and though 'Anthea' seemed to suit, she was no less a stranger in this dark car than she had been in his scant lodgings, gasping a name that may or may not have been his own. He wondered fatalistically if she'd laugh if he kissed her right now. He figured he wouldn't survive long enough to enjoy his answer.

Whether she'd be the weapon of his destruction or her benefactor was an entirely separate matter.

…

The warehouse he was taken to wasn't far out of the heart of London, but it was isolate enough. John knew the area and what types used it to shoot-up when times were desperate or sleep when choices were slim. John knew the seediness of his London too well, and part of him wanted to shield it from the apathetic judgment of the man with the umbrella.

John stepped out of the car, cane-first. His leg still ached from the rain and his shoulder was tender from the effort it took to propel himself forward. All in all, John wasn't at his best, was he? _Never am when I need to be._

He almost asked what aristocrat he'd offended tonight, but decided against it. This man had the look of someone well-connected who oughtn't be. The suit he wore appeared ill-fitting by design. John had met his fair share of those who blended in because they were trained to do so. _How well are you trained and by whom?_

"Good evening."

The man leaned on his brolly with languid ease. _Too sturdy for chipwood. Walking stick or antique sword?_

"Isn't it, Doctor Watson?"

John should have expected a man with the power to turn the eyes of CCTV toward him would be able to find out his name. He was a soldier and a doctor, were he any easier to pick out of a crowd he'd have to be a corpse.

"You know my name. Shouldn't I know yours?"

"Suffice it to say, we have a mutual acquaintance."

"I'm afraid that doesn't suffice. I don't know you."

"Nor I you, Doctor Watson; however, I have the benefit of knowing _of _you. Your reputation well precedes you." John fought to ignore the implication. He did respectable work at all hours of the day. He wouldn't be trampled underfoot by a man who'd no doubt paid for like services in his time.

"I can't say the same for you, but that is what your type prefers, blending in."

"I beg your pardon." The man's colorless eyes momentarily sparked as if interested. _Don't think I was supposed to notice that._ The sight reminded John of something. _Perhaps someone? A client? A patient?_

"No, I don't think so."

Those self-same eyes narrowed in the kind of casual command that was unaccustomed to being disobeyed. _If I had a coin for every major and colonel with that look in their eye…_

"What is your relationship with Sherlock Holmes?"

"Sorry?" _This is about Sherlock. Jesus, who's kept man _is_ he?_

"Since yesterday, you looked at a flat, and now you're solving cases together. Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week?"

"Who are you?" John didn't mind warnings, but intimidation ruined his appetite.

"An interested party."

"Interested in Sherlock, why? From the cloak and dagger routine, I'm guessing you're not friends." _Lovers on the outs?_ The stories he could tell.

The suited man produced a long-suffering hum John was beginning to associate with knowing Sherlock Holmes. "You've met him. How many friends do you imagine he has? In any event, I am the closest thing to a friend Sherlock is a capable of having."

"Which is?" he asked despite a blooming theory he had.

"An enemy. Or an archenemy as he's likely to put it. He does love to be dramatic."

John rolled his eyes toward the bare steel rafters. This man reeked of danger, but no one would ever accuse him of being self-aware. "Well, thank god you're above all that."

"Do you plan to continue your association with Sherlock Holmes?" The steel in his voice was velvet-encased.

"I could be wrong, but I think that's none of your business."

"It could be."

"It really couldn't."

When the oddly pale man with the gleaming eyes began reading John's old therapist's notes from a Moleskin notebook, he was damned angry and not a bit surprised. _You are exactly what I think you are._

"War is hell. Ask anyone that isn't a warmonger." He shot the man a pointed look, knowing very well where the majority of John and his fellow soldiers' orders had come from.

"War is politics played at arm's length."

"War is what killed a great number of my dear friends."

"You _chose_ to join."

"I chose a great many things I didn't really understand at that age—and I'd do it again."

"Because you're a brave man by all accounts."

John grunted.

"Some would say that bravery is merely another word for stupidity."

"Coming from someone with an Oxbridge education, I'll be sure to take that seriously."

"I suppose you think certain aspects of my identity are dreadfully obvious."

"Only some, but enough."

"Your therapist's notes indicate that you've an intermittent tremor in your hand, one that absents itself when you're frightened."

John followed the thin hand coming to grasp his own with his eyes.

"Don't."

Not that the other man listened. He seemed amused at the chance not to. John clinched his jaw.

"You don't seem very frightened."

"I don't find you very frightening."

"Why is that?"

"That's not the most interesting question you can answer for me."

"Oh, and what is?" _I know that expression. Where from?_

John opted to lay his cards on the table.

"I'm curious what MI6 wants with a man like Sherlock Holmes."

"I don't follow."

"We don't have to dance around it. I'm a fusilier, not an idiot. I know SIS when I smell it. The CCTV trick was a power play to get my attention. You have it, now I want to know what you're playing at."

The notebook disappeared into an inside pocket, the brolly switched grasps. _That would be an easy parry._ John wasn't sure if the umbrella or his walking stick would yield first in a foolhardy fight.

"That was unexpectedly observant of you, Doctor Watson."

"It must have been the muesli I had for breakfast."

"Quite."

"I haven't got my answer yet."

"You haven't produced a convincing reason for me to provide you with one."

"In that case, I don't think we have much to talk about." If John could make it outside the sliding hatch, he'd likely have all the backup he might need to overcome a few bodyguards and a man more dangerous than he first seemed.

"Perhaps your associates would have more to say."

John's gaze turned glacial.

"Don't. Don't you dare bring perfectly innocent civilians into this set-up. Most of 'em are kids who can't give you anything, not even intel. Leave them alone."

"I could assist you in caring for your…charges."

John wouldn't begin to parse the meaning the man had poured into that single word. _Does Eton offer a class on single-word condescension?_ And wasn't Mr. Box 500 himself Eton all over? _MI5, MI6, his sort crosses all the bridges, has a finger in every national security pie there is._

"I'd say, as caring goes, you haven't gotten the hang of caring for Sherlock yet. He's thin as a spirit. You leave my friends to me."

The other man actually looked somewhat ruffled at John's accusation of neglecting Sherlock's welfare. He regained his composure—_had he really lost it_?—smoothing his phantom stripe tie further into its meticulous lines. His lip conformed to the same.

"Sherlock has an acrimonious relationship with food, one we both share to our grave misfortune."

John let that remark go on unchecked. The man, whomever he was outside of dank warehouses, was thin as Sherlock bearing a fraction of his muscle tone.

"You should do a better job with him. Whatever he is to you."

"One tries."

"One is failing."

The man of the receding hairline and completely lacking self-awareness inspected the tip of his shoes. John braced for a parting shot. Years of a self-superior father and sister had done him well in that.

"A question to you: How long before your current line of work ceases to be a sufficient means of maintaining your sanity? How long do you suppose before you're off to the races, the poker tables, or some brand new method of risking life, limb, and complete financial ruin? You have certain gifts that could be very useful, Doctor Watson. You'd do well under my employ."

"I assume you don't mean that in the biblical sense." They both shot a glance at Anthea—_not Anthea, some other stripe of stranger_. "I didn't think so."

"I assure your, shall we say _talents_, would be well utilized in the name of queen and country."

"I've given my livelihood to the queen and the country will call when she needs me; I'm sure of it." John leaned into the man's space just enough to feel the umbra of his body heat radiating from skin. "I'm nobody's patsy. I talk when I want. I work for myself. I provide for those that need me. You want Sherlock to _talk_ to you or whatever you swots call it on your level, you'd better get him to pick up his mobile. I'm _out_." John took out his mobile and drew up Sherlock's number.

"Doctor Watson, I advise you to reconsider." The waspish git with the brolly managed to sound ruffled. _Didn't know androids came with that setting._ John let the call ring out until Sherlock finally answer and the other man in the cavernous room fell silent. If anything, he seemed intrigued.

"Hi, Sherlock, it's John. John Watson. Yeah, I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on the flat."

His host looked dismayed, then surprised. His face finally settled on dispassionately impressed. Sherlock didn't sound any better on the phone.

"Is something the matter? Has something happened?"

"No, nothing like that."

"If it's a fat man in a suit—"

John chuckled, regretting that he'd have to abandon this vaudeville act in progress. _What a story that must be. _"Nothing I'm not equipped to handle but thanks for your concern." John was momentarily forlorn. "I'm sorry things didn't work out."

"As am I." He even sounded it. "Good luck."

"And you." They both rang off.

"That was either very wise or very foolish," his posh host remarked.

"Either way, it's very much done. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go home. I reckon you know the way."


	12. The Life III

_The Life_

John had just put his Jane out the door when his phone buzzed. It was an SOS from his new old friend, Sophie Gold. John had his improvised med kit and was out on the town in three minutes cold. He took two cabs and a long walk on a short road. She was sitting on the kerb in front of a Chinese curio shop, bunched into the foetal position, bare toes dangling into the street.

"Goldie?" John kneeled beside her on the pavement. She shuddered and hugged her knees more tightly to her chest. "Sweetheart, it's John. You need to let me check you over." He waited to lay a hand on her. Trauma was the mother of all game-changers where behaviour was concerned. "Come on, love."

She unfurled her body slowly. Her joints popped and bones—bone ends, jagged, broken—ground together. The front of her green dress was ripped and stained. It wasn't all blood.

"Goldie, we need to get you back to mine. I can't treat you here, it isn't safe." This side strip was the opposite of sterile. The filth would permeate his clothes forevermore; he'd need to be shot of the whole lot.

Pulling out his phone, he dialled the first person he knew to live close by. A demoted caller and part-time Yard bait, Lolo Kenton-Higa was the sane woman he needed in a crisis. Provided she was on the wagon, which varied from day to day, he found. Her habits reminded him so much of Harry, his throat ached.

His phone was fixed between his ear and shoulder as he did put pressure on any freely bleeding contusions he could find. She picked up on ring three: "Lolo on the line. What's your poison?"

"Morphine would be great, but I can't find anyone who delivers."

"Johnny?"

"Loana," he intoned, warningly.

"I'm having flashbacks to sixth form. I hope you're proud of yourself."

"Not the time, Lolo. I need to you come meet me by the curio shop and the Haberdashery."

"Wotsa matter?"

"Some freak got Sophie and I can't move her alone." Sophie clutched at his jumper even tighter. He tried to soothe her, knowing all the while he'd fail.

He could hear Lolo leaping up and darting about. She bumped into something, then into something else, and swore. "Fuck, all right. I'm coming over. You're right out front, yeah? I don't have a car. Shit. How're we going to move her? No, never mind, we'll figure something out." The call cut off. John thought she might have forgot she was talking to him. Her lack of focus didn't bode especially well, but he knew when he was beaten by circumstances.

Lolo scampered from a back alley ten minutes on. She was paler than her normal but she was hands and legs with feet and John needed help getting Sophie someplace secure, sterility optional.

"What happened?"

"No clue. I'm not half-sure if the one who did it's gone or not, so we need to haul arse. You think a cab'll take us?"

"With her looking like this, not cheap." Drivers this side of town made good money selling their silence. All the cash John had he didn't have to burn unless it was life or death and this wasn't yet. He'd have to buy his soul back if he let it progress that far.

"Let me borrow your lie-low to fix her up. I'll get her shipshape and we'll figure something out."

Lolo gave a waggish nod, "Yeah, it's whatever. Bring her up to mine."

She whispered comforting words to Sophie as she took her other side. They made slow work of getting back up to the building through the side entrance. The front was just about always watched and John wasn't up to getting shaken down on a goodwill mission. He was short on opiates as it was. _Have to talk to a friend about all that._ John didn't turn a blind eye for much, but he had his deals with the devil, too.

It was easily the work of twenty minutes getting Sophie up to Lolo's flat. The place was a sight better than the last time Lolo had been down and out. _Doesn't smell of sick anymore_, he noted. There was signs of somebody with steadier hands than an addict in recovery doing the straightening-up. _Good one, Lo._

For her part, Lolo didn't seem to much notice his appraisal. She was guiding Sophie step by step to her sofa.

"Here you are, Goldie. Bed's all yours."

Sophie seemed about to protest, but couldn't keep up the strength, her knees buckling at the presence of somewhere soft to rest her bruised head.

John laid his kit out on the trunk Lolo used as a low table shoved off to the side of the sitting room. Sophie'd need some order of stitches, compresses, pressure bandages. He was hoping she wouldn't be any worse off, else he'd have to start calling in favors, which tended to get damned expensive at the eleventh hour. He availed himself of Lolo's WC to scrub up, giving Lolo a bit longer to get Sophie decent before joining her at Lolo's bedside.

"You with us, Gold?"

She breathed in shuddery gasps for a long moment before affecting a nod.

"That's good. I'm glad. I need to check you over a bit. May I do that?"

Sophie hesitated.

Lolo wavered on the spot.

"Lolo can stay in here with us. I promise I won't make her leave. If I do anything you don't want, she'll stop me—knock me out cold in all probability."

Lolo chirped, "I'll even rifle in his pockets to get us some fish and chips for dinner. Just say the word, hun."

Sophie reached out to squeeze Lolo's hand. That was all the consent she could give with her swollen tongue.

Lolo gave a squeeze to John's wrist, avoiding his nitrile-gloved hand that was as sterile as he was going to be in these digs. _Surgery's out of the question, but isn't it usually._

"Hope it's all right that I started boiling some water. I might need that in a minute."

Lolo shook her head. "It's all fine."

John took a deep breath and a step back. _All right, let's do this._

"Goldie, Lolo's gonna hold your hand. You're not alone."

…

John had seen all kinds of wounds in his time in Afghanistan, even some most wouldn't think a war doctor would treat. He was ashamed to say that Sophie's weren't anything new to him and his status as Marylebone's street medic contributed to his jaded outlook. Abject roughness was the norm and rape was damned common in their line of work. _It's like they think we're toys they can use and throw out._ He wondered how many more wounded he'd treat whom he counted as friends, some as family. Somewhere between Lolo and Sophie was Harry had life been that bit less kind.

_I should give her a call._

He stripped off his gloves and packed them away in the storage bag he carried with him everywhere. _Wouldn't do to leave my epithelial cells and fingerprints at the scene of any crimes._ John had done his share of knee-breaking when summoned, but he felt confident that every would-be customer he'd knocked out had deserved it. '_No' doesn't come with a price tag. It's always free._ That was John's policy, one he had few qualms about enforcing for his friends.

Lolo was waiting for him in her kitchen when he stepped out of the loo.

"Tea," she offered.

"You're a star," he murmured and took a hearty sip. She could brew a mean cuppa with almost no effort that he could see.

"You came through for Goldie."

John shrugged his good shoulder. "Why wouldn't I?"

"Because you're nobody's keeper."

"I'm not a keeper. I'm a protector, Lo. I don't like seeing people hurt."

"'S why you became a soldier, eh?" _Everybody wants to hear that story._

"I became a soldier because I was young and stupid. Now, I guess I'm old and stupid."

"You're not so old."

John flexed his tired hands. One shook. "I feel old."

"This life'll make you old before your time."

"But it's the only life I want, so I guess that's my lot."

"All of ours. That's why we stick together."

John raised his cuppa. "So it is."

Sophie groaned in her medicated sleep in the sitting room and they both quieted to listen for her call. She stilled eventually. _Still breathing, still suffering. _All John could think was that something for her had to change.

"I know you've got stuff on, John. Just leave Goldie with me. I'll take care of her."

"You've got stuff of your own to be getting on with."

"Not much. Weren't you thinking about setting up someplace new? Don't wanna get in the way of that."

John hadn't yet decided how to say he and Sherlock Holmes weren't meant to be. Because deep down he still thought they were.

"If you're sure?"

"I am. We're all right, we'll be good for the night." Lolo refilled her cup. John double-checked his kit. He told himself that it was for his own safety and not to make sure his morphine was at it should be. _Addicts will make paranoiacs out of saints._ All was as it ought to be that he could see.

He donned his patched coat.

"Give me a call in the afternoon. I can be here at 6, or even earlier if something's wrong."

"Sounds legit."

"Then, that's my cue." He scratched an itch at the side of his nose. "And, uh, Lolo."

Lolo lobbed her French braid back over her shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Good luck—you know, with everything."

She ducked her head. He could tell she understood what he meant. "Thanks."

**…**

When John headed home after tending to Goldie tonight, he had very specific plans. One more client—Molly who'd remembered his name and number just in time—and a good night sleep to try to regain his strength. Tomorrow was above-board work. He'd need to be on his toes for it.

Naturally, London had other plans.


	13. Sherlock Holmes I

**SHERLOCK HOLMES**

**See end of chapter for content warning.**

* * *

><p>John made the mistake of thinking that passing on 221B meant he'd seen the last of Sherlock Holmes. Someone that posh hadn't any business in the places John frequented. He hadn't any business trawling shady pubs for partners or calling services like John's in search of someone, anyone to give him just the right shag. John was jaded, not blind. He was suspicious as soon as he saw the man through his peephole.<p>

_Sgt. Donovan did say he was a questionable type_, he thought somewhat warily. After taking a moment to retrieve his old gun, John limped to the door and let the dashing gentleman from Baker Street into his dinky excuse for a flat. It wasn't much, but it was better than he'd had at the bedsit.

"Sherlock." He corrected himself, "Mr. Holmes, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I've already asked you to call me Sherlock. I've not rescinded the offer simply because you declined to share a roof with me." He had gone loose-limbed against John's doorframe, and remained so, eyeing John as cannily as any predator.

John became very aware of leaning on his cane just now. "That's very kind of you. Is there something you needed?"

"I..." Sherlock seemed to hesitate, peering about the entryway to John's flat as though the answer lurked anywhere nearby. _Or danger._

John stepped closer to the younger man. He peered up into Sherlock's wide eyes and couldn't help noting just how depthless they were, how they swallowed up any and all light till it was there captured, and reflected right back at him. His pupils were veritable craters on his moon of a face. John might have thought he was aroused if he didn't deal with kids exactly like this on a daily basis.

"You aren't even touching the ground right now, are you?"

Sherlock furrowed his brow, but John didn't think it had anything to do with him. _Even the sharpest mind will dull after a hit or two of coke._

"You are _so_ high London's just a pipedream, isn't she?" John left off Sherlock in search of his medical kit. More than anything, John wanted to send the consulting detective packing with his strung-out curiosity and his unavoidable risk. He had people lined up for tonight, people that were not Sherlock Holmes and he did not need them thinking Sherlock was here to learn or tell tales. Unfortunately for John, though, he was a doctor and he couldn't see sending Sherlock to get himself home this bad off.

'_Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other'? Forgot to mention something, you filthy bugger. _ An addict was the last thing John needed to be saddled with. Harry was burden enough without them living together.

"You just going to stand there or are you coming in for a cuppa?"

He heard Sherlock lurch after him with all the grace of an empty angora jumper. John mentally planned to tidy the knick knacks Sherlock knocked askew after he'd seen the man off this evening. _Christ, I'm rearranging my life around him already._ This was exactly why John had decided to forgo becoming his assistant and flatmate. There wasn't room in his life for that much devotion.

"John Watson."

"Yes?"

"I don't know why I came here tonight." His crisp baritone was dulled to broth.

"Search me. I don't even know how you got my address. I didn't give it to you."

"I have my methods."

"You have Irregulars. One told another who told another. That's how it works. The city's not as big as she looks."

Sherlock's narrowed eyes fairly bulged in his agitation. His flailing created a disturbance that blew over John's unchecked post.

"But _how_ do you know that? You're over a decade out of town, you're just short of technologically illiterate, but you know London's deep corners, her back pockets like I do." He stumbled over his own flat feet though he kept to them. "Where have you been since you came home," he slurred, circling John in his cramped den like he was performing the Paso Doble all by himself. He weaved, erratic and odd, tailored angles jutting out from every side.

John watched him dance.

"You make Lestrade nervous. He couldn't stop looking at you."

"From my perspective, it was you he couldn't keep his eyes off."

"He doesn't trust me not to pilfer evidence."

The more he saw of Sherlock, the more he agreed that constant supervision was of topmost importance. _Look what happens when he's got nobody watching after him._ "Smart man."

Sherlock ticked his head a degree. "Not quite as thick as the rest, I'll grant." He shimmered off, a toppling dervish in navy tweed, pillaging John's meagre stockpile o' tchotchkes for meaning he was unlikely to find. "Mycroft, Lestrade, even Donovan, they're all _aware_ of you in ways that defy explanation." He bent sidewise to glimpse at a photo of John and Harry when they were small and attached at the hip. "Explain."

John eased off his walking stick, shifting unconsciously off the balls of his feet. "Mmm, no, I don't think I will."

Sherlock wound back round to John, his eyes scraping and scrapping every passing surface on their arc to John's face. "Why?"

"Oh, I've got loads of reasons. Because I don't want to. Because I don't have to. Because I don't answer to you. Because _they_ don't answer to you. Take your pick, mix and match, have fun with it. One is as good as the next." Sherlock fixed his gaze on John's lips, seeming intent on saying the words in synchrony. _Am I that predictable? _Sucking back a fortifying breath, John used the rubber tip of his cane to flip down a corner of the rug Sherlock's gormless plodding had rucked up.

"You've got a mouth on you." Sherlock closed his hands like paper fans and away they went into his valley-deep coat pockets. He made for the tiny kitchenette, the keenest sort of high. John cut him off at the knees, smacking his stick along the tops of the wispy bastard's shins. Sherlock pouted, true as god, he did.

"I could say the same for you, actually, but it's the rest of you I'm more worried about, if you want to know the truth."

"Not interested and don't be thick, you're not, that isn't what I meant. A soldier, yes; a yes-man, no." His peculiar face slipped into a thwarted sort of grimace. "You're not thick, not the same sort of it anyway. A soldier with his intuition, a doctor with his experience, but you're more than that. The question is 'how much more?'"

"I couldn't help you with that."

"You could, but you won't."

"I don't even know you."

"You'd like to."

"Have you ever met a liberty you wouldn't take without asking?"

"No."

_Can't even fake it, can he?_

"I'll bear that in mind." John sighed. "How much are you on right now?"

"No idea what you mean."

"My time is good for everything but wasting. Don't."

"This and that. It's all fine."

"It isn't nearly."

Sherlock's RP drawl, even slurred, ran roughshod over John's attempts to hush him.

"Seriously, Sherlock. What is it?"

"Not my solution. Non-toxic, I think." That he was bothered by the uncertainty was written on his face. John was bothered by all of it. _A man like Sherlock, he would know what he took. This isn't coke. He didn't do this._

"Who brought you here?"

"I brought me." He sounded proud of himself.

"You walked."

Sherlock over-emphasized his nod, pleased he'd managed what should have been a simple task. "I walked."

John touched Sherlock's face. _Clammy, cold sweat. Some degree of disorientation. Pupils wide. Coordination affected._

"Tell me again how you got here."

Sherlock pouted at being doubted, and sniffed. "Cabbie, walked, walked."

"How was the weather?"

"Awful."

"How do you feel?"

"Euphoric."

"Do you wanna sit for a minute and feel euphoric on the sofa?"

"Please." Sherlock peered up at John when he remained standing and Sherlock lay sprawled across John's corduroy and paisley cushions. "Sit."

"No, I don't think so." John needed his kit and a penlight. He'd left his in his coat.

Sherlock pulled inasmuch as it could be called that. "Sit."

John's tired leg gave out and he sat. He squirmed to disentangle himself from Sherlock's damn near prehensile feet. _The sod's got limbs like an octopus in the deep._ Once John had given up resisting, Sherlock retracted his bespoke-clad legs to press closer into John's space. His breath smelt of ketones and something else. _Stomach acid. Bile._ Sherlock didn't eat enough.

John pressed twin fingers to one of Sherlock's bony wrists. They might have been delicate were the man a stone heavier instead of starving and stark-raving mad on his sofa. _Tachycardic. His heart's in over drive._

"When's the last time you ate?"

"Irrelevant."

"Not to me. Answer the question." John felt Sherlock's neck. _Lymph nodes normal._ "When did you last eat? Do you have any pre-existing conditions?"

Sherlock hummed in the negative, not that John was predisposed to trust it given the sluggish speed of his pupillary response when John uncovered and re-covered each eye.

"Are you in any pain?"

"No. My senses are pleasantly murky."

"That's not a good thing."

"Seems fine on my end."

"You would think that."

Sherlock tipped himself at any angle to squint in John's face. "Who are you?"

"You know me. We met yesterday. You recited my life story in thirty seconds flat."

The taller man blinked as though that failed to distinguish John in any way. It might not have done. Sherlock seemed to do a lot of deducing.

"You refused my brother."

_Brother? Brother. Of course, the eyes._ John rolled his own for not picking up on the spare resemblance. Not in the face, but that mind of his couldn't have been incidental.

"I don't like bribes."

"You refused me."

"No, not you."

Sherlock pulled a face. "You don't make sense. Nothing makes sense." He scrubbed his face and yanked at his hair. Wincing on behalf of his embattled follicles, John unclenched his clawed fingers from his scalp before Sherlock could hurt himself.

"Your head's a mess. What'd you take?"

"I told you I don't know. I don't." Sherlock curled up into himself. "It's never felt like this." He fretted, "I didn't _mean_ to take…didn't know where…who to call." He pulled at his shambles of hair again.

John disentangled his hands, taking the liberty of checking his long fingers for defensive wounds. He was bruised up, but no blood.

"So you came to me."

"The army doctor." Sherlock chuckled. John didn't quite get the joke.

"I've seen it all."

"You'll keep me right."

That was his job, wasn't it? His calling in life, his debt. So why did John feel like he was failing all the time? He thumbed Sherlock's pulse point at his wrist for his own peace of mind. _Quick as a hummingbird's wing._

"I'll fix you up, promise. But first I've gotta figure out what's wrong with you." He tried to divest Sherlock of his coat, but the lanky bugger refused to part with it. "You're somewhere between an OD and ketoacidosis. What'd you take? What were you _given_? Can you describe it to me? Was it pills?"

John had heard tell of a right toxic brand of crystal and the like making its way 'round the streets. There was a new supplier in town, this one more ruthless than any yet, who engendered loyalty through brass fists as easily as good deeds. He couldn't count how many of his lot had slept it off on his sofa, drooling and rank; lost, at least. Try though he might not to show it, he was worried. The calls for help he was getting were less coherent all the time. _Somebody's got to put a stop to this._ That the smartest man he'd met in a week of prodigies had fallen victim put his back up. _He's no easy mark._

"Sherlock, what did they give you?"

The tall man rolled his head on his marble neck, back from the daze that had him all caught.

"I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about you."

Sherlock wound his arms around John's waist sensuously. He really was all limbs. He began to nibble on John's ear like it was a biscuit. John really was all out of patience.

"Stop."

To John's complete lack of shock, Sherlock disobeyed, squirming deeper into the sphere of John's personal space to breathe weak tea and ketone breath onto his ear. Had John not been so set upon decking the man, he might have been turned on. John's preferences hadn't ever been vanilla, but this might have been too rocky a road, even for him.

"John Watson."

The man so named sighed. "That's my name."

Sherlock butted his forehead to John's temple with enough force to make them both flinch. Holding his no doubt swimming head and scowling, the overgrown child grimaced, "I don't understand you at all."

"Sherlock, the things you don't understand about the human race could cover continents." He broke away from his drunken limpet to fetch them both a glass of water—and to stow his gun.

"But I understand everyone. People are predictable. Dull. Boring. All the same, all motivated by their tedious wants and revolting physical desires."

John returned from his depressive kitchenette to find Sherlock still swaying in place. Eyes momentarily screwed in some kind of formless prayer, he budged the younger man onto the sofa and sat down beside him, pushing a glass of water into his hand. "Don't talk, drink."

He may as well have said nothing at all. Sherlock's exiling of the glass to the coffee table was the work of a moment.

"But you're a queer one," he continued, sounding as if he'd never stopped despite John's stepping out of the room.

John's eyebrow spoke for itself. _Did you just carry on talking while I was away?_

"You're accustomed to being desired. You're comfortable in your deplorable wardrobe, knowing that you'll be pursued in spite of it."

John ground a palm into his eye. _What did I do to deserve this?_

"You don't deny it, then. People want you _despite_ everything about you. Odd." Sherlock began another of his scalding visual assessments. "Average appearance, below average living standard, above average education. Short." John bristled instinctively; Sherlock tutted in dismissal. "You are, no need to take it personally. I'm merely stating a fact. You aren't much to look at on first glance, but you're thought of as kind. You have a tendency to fade from notice, which makes you dangerous and likely more knowledgeable than I've given you credit for up to now. You have a way of making visual contact..." Sherlock paused here, his gaze faltering, and then turning lethal as to shear flesh from bone. "It's tangible with you. I don't understand _why_." He seemed to take personal offense at John's charisma, if it could be called that. _Quite good for being coked to his eyelids._

"I'm a people person, Sherlock, whatever that means to you."

Sherlock's moue of distaste might have been endearing were it not so emblematic of everything socially off about the man. _Handsome, can shout for England, and hopeless with other people. Exactly what I need._

"You're awfully chatty for being this fucked-up. I'd say I was impressed if I hadn't seen better." Wells had been better a number of times. If there was anything John hated more than seeing his kids turning tricks, it was the treats they brought home with them, after. He wasn't their happy uncle or dear old da, he was in no position to be passing judgment; so, he held them while they shook when the sweets ran dry. Addicts were fast becoming his specialty.

"You disapprove."

John disapproved of dealers. Users just made him sad.

"You're an adult, Mr. Holmes, what you do with your body is of little concern to me."

"Is that so?" John nearly licked his lips in response to the triumphant, predatory gleam that came to Sherlock's eyes. John knew that look, had worn it with enough frequency for his muscles to mimic it of their own volition. The consulting detective was on the prowl.

Like a striking cobra, Sherlock spilled over and kissed John. For all that it was clumsy, his hands ice for poor circulation, what it lacked in finesse he more than compensated for with intoxicating submission and a whisper of dominance. Sherlock purred at John's fingers in his hair, parted his lips at the insistence of John's tongue, got a leg over John at his very first opportunity. He was hardening in his trousers.

"Show me," the detective demanded in the space of two kisses. "Show me what they see that I don't."

John let himself be straddled and jailed, pinned by Sherlock's lush mouth and relentless hands. John might have been a pro, but he wasn't dead. A pretty face still had the power to stun him stupid.

The kiss seemed to go on for ages, Sherlock suckling John's lips and tongue until his mouth was a throbbing ache that extended all the way down to his cock. The detective chuckled, grinding down on John's incipient erection with his own. John reached inside the folds of the man's coat to grab his arse in both hands and groaned at what he found. _Of course, he's got a fantastic arse._ _Why, oh why, did you have to be high tonight?_

John loved his job, John loved sex, but what he loved most was a good, solid shag he wasn't being paid for. Sherlock Holmes could have been that shag. But it wasn't to be, obviously, and he'd known it right off. John made for the back of Sherlock's sinewy neck, grasping it solidly till he could cradle that gorgeous skull in his palm.

"Lay down, Sherlock," he nibbled the other man's ripe bottom lip and guided him onto his back. "You're about to get very tired."

Sherlock grabbed for him again, lips seeking more, but his fingers failed to hold the clench. He frowned, starting to shake his head, only to drop into a drowsy sprawl, dazed and molasses-limbed, slipping steadily into sleep. John checked his pulse and found it slowing but regular. Reflecting again on the oddity that his life had become, he went to rinse off the fast-acting sleeping powder smeared on his lips. It wouldn't do for them both to be out cold when his ten o'clock showed up. _I've got an unconscious consulting detecting on my sofa—that'll be good for business_, he bristled, pointlessly bothered. _Maybe I can convince Big Brother to take him home for the good of the Commonwealth? He seems like the type._

But somehow John doubted it. This was what his night was about now, work and Sherlock Holmes. He'd be lying if he said he minded. There was nothing boring about Sherlock Holmes, nothing boring about work. It was just the combination that made him second guess, not that there was much to be done about it now.

The very soul of British decorum, John sighed and then did what they do best: he got on with it.

Sherlock, for his part, merely slept.

* * *

><p>Trigger warning: drugged shenanigans. Just a bit of snogging, not full on dub-con but somebody certainly makes an effort. Questionable medical choices, too, if you squint.<p> 


	14. Sherlock Holmes II

**SHERLOCK HOLMES**

**See end of chapter for content warning.**

* * *

><p>The man who showed up at ten wasn't John's Molly, he knew that on sight. He certainly wasn't the brother. This man was at least a decade John's senior with a twisted mouth and a pageboy cap. He wore bargain basement devilry like an armoured chest plate.<p>

"Been called to pick up one Sherlock Holmes at this address."

"Called by who?"

"Whom," the man corrected off-hand. John squinted at all the snottiness packed into that one word. "And I couldn't say. I only know that's who I'm meant to pick up."

John hadn't survived a war zone by disregarding his gut instincts and his gut said nobody had made that call. Big Brother could do better than this in a pinch.

"A customer to this address."

"Nobody called you from this address. I should know 'cause it's _my_ address and I didn't call."

The stranger made an obvious attempt to look past John into his flat. John shifted ever so to black his view.

"Like I said, you must have the wrong place. No patrons here, I'm afraid."

The cabbie's mouth pinched at the corners. He'd have thought it displeasure were it not for the gleam in his eyes. The cabbie was laughing at him without a sound. John had seen how he glanced over his cane, his faded cardigan, the tips of his brown, careworn shoes. John wasn't one to care much about the state he found himself in, so long he was clean enough for health and pleasant enough of smell to stand himself. He hadn't in all his years of being underestimated been looked down upon so thoroughly. _This is new. Not the good sort of new._ John kept stoic under the mean inspection, momentarily frozen by the leer that found him so wanting.

"All right. I must have missed 'em." The older man tugged at the brim of his pageboy cap in parting and turned off down the dim walkway in the direction of the street as if he hadn't made an arse of himself on somebody else's doorstep.

It struck him, as the man's silhouette shrunk in the orange lamplight illuminating the pavement and he passed a stumbling figure in fishnets, that he hadn't been looking down on John because of his clothes. He'd been looking down on John because he _knew_. Like Lestrade had bumped his shoulder in the pub and known, like Donovan had spotted his walk and known. They knew what he was and what he did. The latter two didn't hold it against him; the cabbie had spotted his address and sussed out his comfort with strangers, and then to relegated him to trash, all in a glance.

John rubbed his leg. The rude cabbie was well out of sight, still John kept watching the street's shadows carp back and forth. The evening walkers would be heading out to catch the late night pub crawlers in need of an endorphin fix. The early sleepers should have already returned, save the typical stragglers who crossed over the shift line, others who took the long way home to throw off a patron who thought they'd found love between a stranger's legs. He kept his door open for them to have someplace safe to duck when he wasn't entertaining, to be the first pair of hands that reached for them without wanting anything when it had all been sold for rent.

He tapped his cane, checked the time. _Molly's missed out._ He had a policy about missing appointments, one freebie plus excuse. This was Molly's second strike. The first, he knew, had been down to Sherlock demanding entry to a morgue some months ago. Given that Molly was otherwise the punctual sort and horribly smitten with a certain brilliant git, he'd given her a pass. He wondered what had kept her today, what with Sherlock hoarding his air inside and Molly a no-show. _I'll have to check my mobile._ He wasn't one for banning customers, keeping track of his time was tantamount to keeping track of his income—time wasted was money lost and London was rife with cost. Waiting around was a luxury he couldn't afford, not even for his most loyal customers.

_I'll bring it up with her in the morning. She's probably all tucked up with Toby for the night._ She was painfully sweet.

John pursed his lips, his thoughts returning to his unwanted visitor once again. He hadn't been looking for just anyone. John had been an unwanted surprise on the other side of the door, an unknown quantity that he hadn't know better than to rattle for sport. John had enemies in the neighbourhood, bosses he'd had words with, would again, whose girls and boys he'd firmly pulled from service when they came back too bloodied, too concussed and stupid high on uppers, or worse goddamn near forgetting to breathe on the comedown. He knew these people; he hadn't known that man, and that was wrong somehow.

_Someone who knows the area and hates our lot. That was more than distaste. He hated me on sight. _He hadn't gazed very kindly on the spindly pretty boy in suspenders he'd passed either. John had felt his sneer yards off. It had been all he could do not to get involved, but the prick had kept hands-off and pretty boy—John would know his name eventually, he was sure—had stumbled into his own flat soon after, with John knowing enough the sting of humiliation to leave him to it.

_He hates us, and he didn't come for me._ John's gut churned as he turned to spot Sherlock's hair sticking up over the armrest of the couch. _What would he want with Sherlock Holmes? How did even know Sherlock was here?_

John closed his eyes and smacked his fist on the doorframe. Sherlock had been drugged and followed. That cabbie, that smug prat had done this, or he was involved with it. One way or another, he was responsible and he was still walking. _A man unafraid to drug a detective on a lane filled with people who have nobody to vouch for them._ John was livid, and not a little scared.

He ought to call someone. Lestrade perhaps? Sally, Welby's Sally? He could call either of them, even be reasonably sure he'd be believed, but it would be hours yet before they came and who knew who the cabbie could get his hands on in that time? Welby could be next. John's stomach knotted, though he tried paste on a smile for a boy he knew ran errands for a cartel three blocks east. The coppers probably gave him grief enough. John weighed his options once the boy had passed. _Call the coppers and let him go. Or get him myself._

John switched his cane over to inspect his rock steady left hand. _Suppose there's not really much contest, then._

He pushed the door to and retreated into his burrow to see to his patient, touching the back of his hand to Sherlock's skin to check for fever. None. Though still cool, the clamminess had left him. He hesitated to leave the man unattended in his current state, but there was something about that cabbie was setting off the worst of alarm bells in John's head. Those alarms had led him out of Afghanistan mostly intact, he tended to heed them.

"Sure could use a consulting detective tonight." John brushed back Sherlock's damp curls because he could and they were there. "Stay safe. I'm locking you in. Don't go anywhere." He fetched a bucket, a banana, and a bottle of sports drink, and then a note to write down instructions. _This is why doctors have nurses._ All the same, he narrated as he wrote, an eye peeled on the door of his flat. "Drink and eat these the moment you wake up. The very moment. As it is, I may be carrying you to the A&E before dawn.

Sherlock slept on, his breathing hurried but comfortingly constant. His eyes shifted underneath translucent lids, lashes flickering. In some ways, he was just another kid for John take care of, if taller, smarter, and more stunning than his usual clan.

He shook his head, fond despite his best efforts at distance.

"Bollocks to this. Don't turn my flat into a crime scene, you daft git. You'd best alive when I get back."

John grabbed his gun from the kitchen and strode out the door, pulling it to lock behind him. It wasn't until he'd passed a huddle of co-workers playing dice in the alleys a brickwall over that he realized he'd left behind his cane. _Sherlock Holmes strikes again._ John hadn't felt this alive in weeks.

A black taxi idled at the kerb not far from the entry gate of the apartment block. Rude cabbie was visible in stark relief to the phosphorescent light gleaming through the windshield. John knew him by the cap, hated him by it at once. There's a short, slight body angling through the lowered window, half-in. The cabbie was making some kind of face, offering something—money, was it? John scowled. If there was one thing he hated more than a judgemental twat, it was a hypocritical, judgemental twat. This one'd be just the type to stamp 'whore' on a call girl's forehead in daylight and get his cock sucked for a fiver by night.

"Not on my block," he muttered to himself.

John ambled over to the cab like his ride had kept him waiting and he was paying to travel. He tapped the petite whip of a boy, not one he recognized, on the spine.

"Sorry 'bout it, lahv, this 'un's taken."

The nameless rentboy twisted around, all coal eyes and gunmetal temperament. He was more man than boy, and his body trembled with the force of that maturity.

"Who says?!" The accent threw him, though not for long.

John smiled and grabbed the trim stranger by the short hairs. John's temper was chrome and his gun was faster. This wouldn't be the first time he took somebody down for their own good. "_I_ say. Any other questions?"

The dark-haired man, pale, a mite taller than John with a face twice as expressive folded, tantrum ended. "'m sorry. Sorry. Go, go on. Take it. I didn't mean nothing by it. It's yours." The younger man shook in his ragged boots, his dark eyes wide as copper pieces.

John nodded sternly and tried not to feel too guilty getting in back of the taxi. He hadn't wanted to make a scene. He hadn't meant to and yet, better a scene than a dead body. Funny, though, something told him that Irishman could have held his own.

**…**

**…**

"Who are you," John asked the one man in London he didn't care to know.

"You haven't figured it out?"

"Is it supposed to be a riddle?"

"It's only a conundrum if you can't work it out."

_What is that supposed to mean?_ Turned out, he really could have done with a consulting detective after all; the cabbie was obviously mad.

John leaned forward to read the license on the dash. "Jefferson Hope. Is that name supposed to mean something to me?"

"Doesn't have to."

"That's good, because it doesn't. Who are you and what did you want with my friend?"

"Your 'friend'?" Hope chortled as if John had made a terribly clever joke. "Some friend to kiss you like that."

"What are you on about?"

"Take a look at yourself, mate. Just who's doing who a good turn?" Geez, the innuendo was thick in that one

John gave himself a distracted once-over. His lips were red and fuller than usual; a kissed look. He'd worn his share.

"What business is it of yours what Sherlock is to me? What's he to you?"

"An adversary."

_The plot thickens beyond measure. What James Bond spin-off have I come onto?_

"I know this may surprise you, but people don't have adversaries in real life."

"Don't they?" he asked, arch, squinting against the oncoming headlights, drawing a clenched hand about his nape. John didn't know what his problem was, but he bitterly hoped it hurt. If he was the one who'd left Sherlock in the state he was in, he was in for a world of pain, John vowed.

Hope seemed to have had his fill of goading small talk as he shut up for the duration. The streets grew quieter around the cab as the hour grew later and traffic lightened to a mizzle at the intersection. It was all day schools and shut down family coffee shops this way, the only pedestrians still wandering had to be those doing it for pay. _Secluded spot in town. He's got plans for me._ John stilled his innate urge to reach for his sidearm. It wouldn't do to give the game away.

They stopped outside a building, tall and forbidding as any other on the block, indistinct in every way. There were no cars besides those passing in slashes of high-intensity beams and tail lights beacons leaving them behind. John was on his own. _Good. _He preferred the lack of witnesses.

"Get out. We're going up." Hope smiled like he'd won a battle they hadn't begun to fight and hopped out of the cab, spry as anything.

_No battle lines drawn yet and he's already crowing._

"Why would I do that?" John asked him once he'd come round to his door.

Hope took out a gun and pointed it at John's chest.

"Because you'll die if you don't."

John stared at the oversized revolver in the other man's hand. His grasp was all wrong, he'd break his wrist the instant he got off a shot. The kickback would skew his aim. Though there wasn't anybody shambling about on this stretch of road, there were buildings where lights burned in the windows despite the hour. The ricochet could injure somebody John couldn't see or protect.

_That's if it's real._ He didn't think it was and even so he refused to risk casualties on a hunch. He had questions.

John got out of the taxi.

"Yeah, all right. Lead the way."

"Oh, no, I insist. After you." He signalled, barrel first, for John to precede him into the sparely lit building. Some kind school if the signage was any indication. The front doors were unlocked, low security lights buzzed in electricity-fuelled tranquillity. A perfect setting for murder if John said so himself.

They walked up four flights of stairs. Four. John would have been limping even if he'd never taken shrapnel to the leg. The cabbie fared little better, visibly sweating as he was by the time he led John into some kind of classroom. At his behest, John sat on the far side of the table, back to the gaping windows; he took the opposite chair, back to the gaping doors. His skin prickled for want of decent cover, he was exposed.

Hope said nothing for moments that stretched to minutes. John was the embodiment of patience—in danger as in lust, he could wait.

"There's something off about you, you're wrong. It wafts off you like a bad smell. You're no good and you've been up to no good, and I want to know why."

"Why? The most complicated question in the whole of recorded time, _why?_ Dunno why I should tell you when you can't figure it out on your own. _Why?_ Why not? Answer me that."

"You're talking in riddles."

"Riddles are mysteries for idiots. I don't expect you to understand."

"Good, 'cause I don't. Take pity on a fool. Who are you?"

"An interested party."

John wanted badly to massage his aching head. "That's the second time I've heard that tonight. What—no, I'll clarify—who are you interested in and _why?_"

"Sherlock Holmes is a beautiful man, wouldn't you agree?"

John hadn't seen this discussion taking that turn. Given how Hope had carried on this far, he could be sure whether the man was serious or just needling him.

"He's attractive enough, I suppose. What's that got to do with you dosing him, and let's not pretend you didn't. I'm a doctor, not an idiot."

"I beg to differ."

"So would he, but you're not him, and I don't take lip from cab drivers, so there's that."

Hope reached into his jacket and John stiffened. The threat he was wielding like a child's toy was little more than a toy itself, John could see that now, but that didn't mean he wasn't prepared for anything. Predators had contingencies by the dozen; that was what allowed them to succeed where prey fell.

It was to his profound relief that all Hope produced from his pockets were two phials of pills.

"Now, we're going to see how smart you really are, _Doctor._" The spoke the title as one would a mark of shame, unlike anyone John had ever heard speak it. Not his jealous, mourning father, nor his jealous, sodden sister on a vicious, Cosmopolitan-stained tear.

"You hate doctors. Why do you hate them?"

"We're not here to talk about me. Choose a pill."

"No, we're here to talk about you, exactly, and what it is you want with my friend."

" 'Friend.'" The quotation marks had taken on a life of their own in his hands. John stared.

"It truly shocks you that he would befriend me, doesn't it?"

"Look at yourself, Doctor. A broken man, a broken body. Can't even afford a decent roof to sleep under or pot to piss in. Why do it? Why go on?"

John leaned back, his brows drawn up in bemusement. They were questions John had asked himself before, did more often when his purse was hurting and his stomach ached for a meal of more than beans and bile. He asked himself that when his should ached in the rain and he couldn't sew a straight stitch. All sorts of the questions like that, he'd asked in the months since a hollow point blew his shoulder apart, and the answer since had been the same: So long as people needed him, John had plenty of reason to go on. So he did.

"Why not?" he retorted simply, turning Hope's own blithe narcissism back on him. John lived because his life had purpose. Wasn't that the best reason to continue living?

"Your pet genius came stumbling to you on a high. Did you enjoy him, Doctor? Was he good for you?"

"I honestly can't tell if you're disapproving because you're a bigot or because you're jealous I got to him first."

"Oh no, Doctor. You didn't get to him first."

John's glared darkened. He didn't know if Hope was being serious or just spitting vitriol to rile him, but he didn't like what he was hearing.

"If I find out you touched him…" Idle hands needed threats, John made promises.

"I did more than that."

He tightened his fists. He would destroy this man.

"You loathsome son of a bitch. You won't get away with that."

"No, you see, I will get away with it. It's simple logic. Natural selection breeds some to live and others to fall. You'll fall like all the others. You're not better."

"You're insane. I'm sure of it as of now, if I wasn't to start." John folded his hands under his chin. "Thank you for confirming it."

"All the greats were thought madmen in their time."

"You've skipped the great bit and gone right to mad. Well done." He wet his lips, planning his exit. The gun wasn't real—not Hope's anyway. The cabbie might have had a quarter meter in height on John, but he didn't have fifteen army years' worth of muscle, minus a few bedridden months. "I barred you from your mark and you decided to make a go of me anyway. I can't figure out if that makes you stupid or just psychotically depraved."

Hope chuckled and spun the cylinder of his revolver like the laughable B-movie villain he was shaping up to be.

"There's nothing stupid about genius."

John eyed the pair of pills standing on the bare table between them. He'd heard something about this, hadn't he? Seen it on the news, read it in the paper. This was the case Sherlock had dragged him to before the man had ditched him hell for leather. _Not suicides, then. Point for Sherlock._ He crossed his arms in some self-satisfaction. Sherlock would be green with envy.

"Everything you've just said is wrong. I don't have to be genius to see a losing game for what it is."

The cabbie sneered, "Choose a pill."

John shook his head. "Mmm, no, I don't think I will."

The cabbie—_bloody awful cabbie!_—lifted his gun and pointed it at John's face. John had the benefit of an arse-backwards psychological makeup. His hand twitched when confronted with the weapon and the man smirked, wretchedly smug to his cap, unaware that he'd snatched the wrong soldier for a fare. _He brandishes a fake gun at me and I'm supposed to be scared?_ Since there was nothing to fear, adrenaline couldn't be bothered to steady his hand. Perhaps some other crisis. This moron had no idea that John was the more dangerous of the two, and the better armed.

"Not feeling too clever now, are ya?"

"Nah, I'm still feeling pretty slick." John reclined in his straight back chair, his flippant attitude not the least contrived. The stories John could tell about egos this size.

"Pick a pill. Prove your worth."

"I'm not that type, sorry. Never needed a pretty bit of flair to make myself look big enough. I never get any complaints."

Hope's expression darkened in time to the swelling of a vein at his temple.

"You should get that looked at. Can't feel good."

"You think you're so smart. What's to stop me driving back to that ratty old shithole you've got and finishing the job?"

"Oh, I dunno, how about me?"

"I'm supposed to be intimidated by a gimp with a limp?"

"If you had a modicum of sense, yeah, but I won't waste good money on that bet." John flexed his fingers. "The wise thing to do would be for you to get in your cab and leave Sherlock Holmes alone. You don't strike me as wise, not at all."

"I'm chockfull of wisdom, friend."

"I may not know what Sherlock is to me, but you're no friend of mine, _old chum_. I'm through listening. I'm leaving."

John stood and stretched. This had been an exercise in ridiculousness. Despite that, he little doubted this cabbie spelled trouble for his next customer. John wasn't going to let that slide. He wouldn't be a man of principle, however flawed, if he did.

"If you go, Sherlock Holmes will pay. That's your gambit, you or Holmes."

"Well, now, _that's_ a conundrum."

"Ain't it?" The cabbie wagged one of those god forsaken phials till the pill jangled in a discordant song.

John stared the man down. The man who had killed multiple people. Who had hurt his friend, perhaps worse than he'd realized. The human threat who vowed to harm Sherlock again, and more besides. He just couldn't let that happen. He wouldn't.

Hope stood. "What's it gonna be?"

"If I let you walk out of here, what would you do?"

"I'd find your little friend and remind him of our game."

"And if I stopped you?"

"You won't. I've got connections." Men like Hope always did; that was how they stayed free.

"That's what I thought."

John pulled his gun from under his jumper, aimed, and fired. The cabbie dropped, a house of cards that could not stand. John rounded the table to see the man all but convulsing as harsh breathing filled the air. _He's hyperventilating? I clipped him at best._ It was a clean graze through the shoulder, enough trauma to the meat to stop him short but not to stop his heart.

Hope was staring up, wide-eyed, surprised. _Shocked. He's going into shock._ John didn't have a blanket to spare and he'd left without his personal shock blanket.

"I go to clip a man and he dies at my feet. This is the kind of night I'm having." John pressed his hand against the wound he'd left on the murderous cabbie's upper right quadrant. "All right, all right. Calm down. You're going to be fine." John had lied to a hundred dying men, another wouldn't do his soul any harm, not if the demon of a man lived.

The older man shook his head, gasping. He was bleeding into a tacky lake on the floor. He was bleeding from his ears. _Hang on…_

From his nose.

_Christ._

"Dy-dying," Hope elucidated as though John hadn't picked up on that.

"Guess we'll go for the hard sell, then," John mumbled to himself. "Yeah, this isn't good."

The cabbie slurred, "An'rysm."

_Explains his problems with medicos_, John wagered. Not everything could be healed.

John sighed and reached for the penlight he carried by force of habit. The man's pupils were blown and uneven. _Shit._

"Look," he gentled his voice, "you know as well as I do what's happening here. You're dying and my guess is you've seen this coming. Let's end this on a good note. You need to tell me who sent you for Sherlock Holmes tonight." The man's attention was drifting, his pulse was slowing. Between the gunshot wound and the aneurysm, there wasn't much time. John clamped down his hand, remorseful yet unrelenting. "Tell me!" His thigh cramped horrendously in tandem. _Keep it together, old boy, you've done worse in the shadow of war._ He shunned the voice that rattled, dutiful, _'But this isn't war.'_ It was friendship, it was something else.

"Now."

"Moriarty!"

"Who?"

"Mor-Moriarty."

"Who's that? Who's Moriarty?"

"Mor...Mur...mah." John was losing him. "Mo...mo." John was going to lose him anyway. "Mmm…." The man went still, flooded pupils gaping, eyes wide and dim; dark streams of blackish-red blood dripped from both nostrils carrying clots of grey tissue. John had lost him.

_Fuck._

John was in a bind. He needed to assess his situation and fast. His hands and wrist cuffs were stained with blood. He had a glancing smear of the stuff on his denims and an untold amount of gunpowder residue on his hands and sleeves. He had his gun on him. John wasn't one to abandon the scene of the crime, but he couldn't be here when the Met rode in. The court system would have him for luncheon.

_All right, I've got to make an exit. _ John scrubbed his palms on his pants. He considered making for the nearest lavatory, but thought better of leaving more of his fingerprints at the scene. _Can't leave anymore prints, need to get out. How?_ On a lark, John reached into his coat pocket. _Gloves, right. I meant to give these to Cav and I missed him._ While they were small even for John's hands, he made them fit, circulation disruption be arsed.

_This is taking too long._ John spun dizzily in search of the shell casing from his single shot. He had to crawl under the table for it. He buttoned is into his left breast pocket. Then, he rubbed down the area where he'd sat with the clean bit of a used Kleenex tissue he found in the bin. Quite sure he'd wasted as much time as he dared, John skirted the cooling body on the floor and made a break for it, eschewing the way he and the cabbie had come to leave.

The streets he walked to return to his dingy digs were undisturbed by sirens. _Someone must have heard that shot, someone must have called._ John was sure he was up on two dozen CCTV monitors. _The killer walks._ No one stopped him, so he carried on, calm as any man not afraid of the dark, hands shoved to the lower seams of his pockets.

He made it all the way home.

John didn't see the Irishman he'd shafted out of the cab on his way back. _Suppose they had to find another ride._ He hoped they had, he hoped they wouldn't say anything. John didn't much fancy his chances as an inmate.

He slipped into his humid flat to see the consulting detective of his brief acquaintance still conked out on his sofa. He was damp and shivering, probably running a fever to boot. John didn't check, instead he secured his feeble locks and retreated to the bathroom to scrub up. He tossed the entire lot into the hamper down to his pants, figuring it less suspect to wash it all than be caught binning it. He rubbed his fingers, palms, and forearms down with soap, water, and medical-grade disinfectant. Next, he scoured his face and chest in lieu of a shower, all the while concocting a plan to deceive London's most observant man. _Easy work, then!_ John loved a challenge.

His SIG went the way of his med kit, closer than hands and feet and more inconspicuous, besides. He grabbed up his cane and made to hobble over in its care to check on Sherlock again. Sherlock's pulse had slowed considerably.

The younger man shifted sideways at the touch to offer John a view of bleary glasz eyes. John pushed a mixing bowl into his uncoordinated hands where the bucket had been. Sherlock cradled it to him like a lover at the sour end of an affair. There wasn't much to throw out, spittle and bile mostly, as well as the ugly end results of a banana and garish purple juice.

"You've changed outfits. What for?" Sherlock sounded better already.

"You did your best Linda Blair impersonation all over the last thing I had on. I figured a wardrobe change was in order." A bitter rush masked the weft of the lie.

Sherlock pursed his mouth. "I haven't eaten in three days, or kept anything down since…" He frowned.

"You mean your brother didn't pour a bowl of borsht down your throat just today? I distinctly remember him vowing on the Crown Jewels to do just that." Genius brand of fraternal hovering put _QI_ to shame for entertainment value.

Sherlock gagged. "Ugh, don't mention him with my stomach like this." He folded his appendages to his trunk, sheltering the bowl in the angle of his lap. "It's awful. He puts me off my feed."

"I'm thinking you're pretty off it anyway."

The detective hazarded a puzzled smile. "You fixed me."

"I tried. That's all a doctor can do."

John took care in brushing Sherlock's hair away from his brow. He'd be heading into the preliminary stages of withdrawal anytime now probably. John was hoping Sherlock's overly concerned archenemy would be along to fetch him prior to that. John's compassion and free time only extended so far. _Ignoring that I might have killed a man for him._ John had an alarming gift for compartmentalization.

"What on earth am I going to do with you, Sherlock Holmes?"

John hadn't expected an answer from the man threatening to detox in his tiny sitting area. The drugs should have kept him knocked out for hours yet. John didn't even want to consider what this said for his drug tolerance levels. Naturally, Sherlock Holmes defied expectation.

He rasped, "Come home with me." Sherlock bloody Holmes of the Belstaff greatcoat and colour wheel eyes asked to take John home. And for once in a very great while, John didn't have to think of sex or money to say yes.

It was a relief.

...

…

The next morning found him hovering over his latest charge, finally woken. _The posh bastard never showed._ John had missed his ten o'clock anyhow off on his errand to deal with the cabbie with a drug problem. Sherlock looked up at him from beneath the warm cloth draped across his forehead, high coloured spots on his cheeks, pupils recovered from the veritable pinpricks they had been. "I trust I haven't done anything else _too_ mortifying since yesterday."

John decided against recounting the night's events. Even without the death-toting cabby, it'd been murder. "Potential flatmates ought to know the worst about each other. Now, we do." It wasn't a complete untruth, but it was certainly a lie. It felt all the more gut-twisting to keep it to himself, regardless. John tried to be a good man, he just failed sometimes. "About that flat: how's tomorrow sound to you?"

* * *

><p>Trigger warning: minor character death, innuendo of dub-connon-con.


	15. The Life IV

_The Life_

John came back to Lolo's to see to Sophie first thing that afternoon after he'd done a locum shift at a clinic in the neighbourhood and seen Sherlock Holmes off in a sleek black car.

Sophie was up and trudging very carefully around Lolo's flat by then, swaddled in a couple of overlapping robes, because Sophie was broader in about every way that Lolo was narrow.

He watched her move, only intervening when she was on the verge of tears with her pain. He had the drugs he needed for Sophie and his kit. He could save her the biting agony of it, if not the soreness that followed with.

"You don't have to hurt this much, y'know. I'd take care of it."

"Lolo can't, so I won't." She was hunched over her bruised ribs, panting ever so slightly. If he so much as heard a hint of a rasp, John would personally carry her to the A&E. She could wallop his arse after she got a clean bill of health.

The street crowd stuck together where others let slip. That meant they dried out together, too. Lolo had slunk off to down the way for one reason or another John was choosing not to question. _One crisis per visit. That's all I can manage._ He wasted the very prayers on Lolo that had been lost on Harry.

"What are you looking to do?"

She made an aborted attempt to shrug, only stopping when her face screwed up in abject misery. Her stitches were sure to have pulled. He'd have to check once Lolo'd come back. Sophie was wary even of him and he didn't blame her a bit.

"I wanna make a change. Can't keep getting roughed up by cheapskates who don't want to pay to play. I'm too old for this." She was thirty-seven without a friend in the world. John had more friends than he could manage around now, including this one, and they were keeping him up nights.

"What do you _want_ to do?"

"No clue. What can I do, Johnny?" She sniffed at the piss poor view out the window. "I know how to turn tricks. I can't even figure out a till. I gave that a try and I couldn't keep myself in food and house for a month. This makes me money I can live on."

"It just also nearly kills you with terrifying regularity."

She whimpered at the futility of her situation. John would have given her every dime he had if he thought it would save her any trouble in the long run.

"'S nothin' for it. I can't afford a bodyguard. I'm not competitive enough to get a room at an inn, even if they're looking. I can't do this on a kerb anymore. I guess I can't do it at all." Sophie winced on trying to scratch her neck. The skin was already knitting but still so tender.

Sophie was damned strong, but she'd been through enough. What she needed was someone who could make the whole of London sit down and _listen_, who would keep Sophie safe in the offing.

John had a thought about a very beautiful dominatrix in need. She had need of an assistant and need of a submissive on whom to lavish her particular brand of attention. He wondered just which way Sophie bent.

"Say, Goldie, how do you feel about Belgravia?"


End file.
